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The 

BLACK PANTHER 
OF THE NAVAHO 






[Page 224] 


“Hi ! Hi ! — B ack !— Halt !” 




BLACK PANTHER 
OF THE NAVAHO 


BY 

WARREN H. MILLER 

AUTHOR OF “THE RING-NECKED GRIZZLY,” “THE 
BOYS’ BOOK OF HUNTING AND FISHING,” ETC. 



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


NEW YORK : : 1921 : : LONDON 



COPYRIGHT, 1921 , BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


0C1 lb 1921 


Copyright, 1921, by The Curtis Publishing Company 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


©CLA627295 



•vi c 'V 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Wonderland of the Southwest ... 1 

II. Across the Painted Desert 25 

III. The Valley of the Cliff Dwellers .... 44 

IV. Lost Canyon 68 

V. The Claws of the Black Panther .... 89 

VI. Ruler Takes a Hand 114 

VII. The Fire Dance of the Navaho 136 

VIII. Silent Pines and Yellow Crags 162 

IX. Kaibab Grizzly . . . 183 

X. The Desert's Frown 206 

XI. White Mesa 221 

XII. The Last Stand of the Black Panther . . 236 







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THE BLACK PANTHER 
OF THE NAVAHO 


CHAPTER I 

THE WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 

C OLONEL COLVIN sat in a great roomy 
armchair in the Colvin Trophy Den, puffing 
reminiscently at a short black pipe and gaz- 
ing abstractedly into the flickering flames of glowing 
logs in the rugged stone fireplace that was the heart 
of the Den. Sid, his son, and Sid’s chum, Scotty, 
were patching their cruiser moccasins with hand 
sewing-awls, the former now and then glancing over 
at his father anxiously. 

The Colonel looked peaked and worn, — a thin, 
gray ghost of his former robust self, — for his duty 
during the War had been onerous in the extreme, as 
head of the Army Detail Office at Washington. Sid 


i 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


feared a total collapse of the old Indian fighter, for 
nothing is harder on the system of a man raised to 
years of violent outdoor life than a long period of 
desk work. Sid knew the only road back to health. 
His father knew it too, but, so far, he had not made 
the first move toward hitting the trail again. How- 
ever, a certain expectant look in the Colonel's eyes, 
certain mysterious telegrams which the boy had been 
detailed to send, addressed to an old Army friend 
out in Arkansas, had distilled the air of big events 
to come which hovered persistently in the atmos- 
phere of the Den. 

Sid himself was heavier and even more bronzed 
than when we saw him last, on his hunt for the 
Ring-Necked Grizzly out in Montana. The War, he 
realized, had been but an episode, — a tremendous 
episode, it is true — but still only an episode in his 
life. For some mysterious reason both he and 
Scotty had been transferred to the artillery, where 
he had risen to sergeant and had been the little 
king over two six-inch howitzers. His memories 
of the War had been of miles and miles of muddy 
roads and ceaseless rain; of tractors and tanks that 
had hauled his howitzers always forward behind 
the Front; of dog-tired days and weeks when they 
2 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


had crept toward the Vesle, ditched for passing staff 
cars and corduroyed out of mud sinks around shell 
holes. And then there had been glorious, stunning, 
vivid moments when he had stood between his two 
guns, telephone receivers over ears, shaken off his 
feet by the blinding yellow flashes all around him, 
watching the timing, correcting the ranges and de- 
flections coming in from his spotter, or rushing to 
the gun shields when a Boche H. E. seemed about 
to register a direct hit. It was a man’s job, while 
it lasted; almost unnoticed, Nature had put on his 
upper lip a fine black fuzz that told the world that 
Sid was no longer a boy. 

To Scotty the War had been more than an epi- 
sode. It had introduced a great change in the red- 
haired boy’s life, for he now wore a black bandage 
on his arm, and the Henderson service flag bore a 
gold star. Of them all, the good old Doctor had 
not returned. A Fokker ’plane bomb had found out 
the first-aid dressing station where the grizzled old 
physician had stood, bathed to his shoulders in gore, 
working without rest or sleep for the thirty-six 
hours of a major engagement. That was all ; there 
was nothing left of the dugout after that shell had 
crashed through its roof and exploded. But there 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


were aching hearts in the Henderson home because 
of it, and Scotty looked older and sadder. The 
worry of measuring his earning power against this 
new and hectic America that had emerged from the 
War had cast a settled sternness on his youthful 
face. Days in the open would now be a matter of 
precarious vacations for him! 

As the boys mended camp gear the rumble of a 
big automobile express sounded out in the street, 
its brake shrieking as it stopped before the house. 
Colonel Colvin moved in his chair and listened ex- 
pectantly. They heard the grunt of men struggling 
under some heavy load, and then the stamp of their 
feet as they came around the yard path and stopped 
before the outside door of the Den. A thunderous 
knock brought all inside to their feet. 

“Come in!” shouted the Colonel, springing up to 
open the door. Two expressmen stood grinning 
out in the snow, holding between them a long, heavy 
crate. The leader proffered a thumbed and dog- 
eared book for the Colonel to sign. 

“Bring 'em right in and set her down, men,” or- 
dered the Colonel, after paying out a bill and some 
change. The expressmen crowded into the Den, 
setting down the crate with a big sigh of relief. 

4 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


“I think you’ll find ’em all right, sir,” grinned the 
man of the official cap. “Nice pups, eh?” 

Sid jumped for the crate, and a tingle of joy 
thrilled through him. Pups, eh ! Why, then 

“Beauties!” chortled the Colonel, replying to the 
man. “Three Redbone pups, by Ruler out of Music, 
sir. Reg’lar old-fashioned Southern cold-trailers 
from Arkansas.” 

The expressman evidently owned some rabbit 
beagles himself, for he looked over the dogs with 
renewed interest. “What breed of houn’ dogs might 
these be, Colonel, if I might ask?” 

“Coon hounds, man ! The old pioneer’s hound — 
best bear and lion dogs in the world,” explained 
the Colonel enthusiastically, while Sid winked bliss- 
fully over at Scotty. 

The very smell of their lithe, active bodies seemed 
to bring the tang of mighty mountain ranges into 
the Den again. Watching the dogs, the Colonel’s 
age fell away from him as a mantle; his eyes 
sparkled, he moved about the crate, eying the pups 
like a boy, and then sent Sid into the main house 
for tools. The log-walled Den, hung with game 
heads, rifles and saddles, was a replica of the 
Colonel’s western log cabin of his younger days. 

5 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Built as a wing on to their great town house, there 
was an entrance direct into the house from it. The 
expressmen departed, with many a comradely grin, 
while the Colonel and Scotty waited impatiently for 
Sid to return with his hammer and cold chisel. 
Then two upper slats of the crate were lifted, and 
out jumped the pups, one after another, to range 
about the room on long, skinny legs. Never were 
such long-eared, rat-tailed smell-dogs, it seemed to 
Sid and Scotty, as they watched them delightedly, 
while the Colonel dug up a set of new collars and 
chains out of a drawer in his desk. Evidently he 
had known all about those dogs in advance, reasoned 
Sid, as he watched this proceeding. And, as they 
could not possibly be used anywhere in the eastern 
states, there was more to this than appeared on the 
surface ! 

They took them out into the snow for a brief 
airing. Once back in the Den again, Sid nailed 
the Colonel imperatively. 

“You’ve got something up your sleeve. Father, — 
don’t tell me!” he laughed, “Where are we going, 
and when is it coming off?” 

The Colonel grinned indulgently. “I tried my 
level best to buy Ruler, the father of these pups; 

6 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


but Judge Hawkes would rather part with his own 
right hand than with Ruler !” he remarked, irrele- 
vantly. 

“Answer me, sir — please!” begged Sid. “When 
— oh, when, Father? — and where?” 

“The big problem is how to give them a bit of 
training,” grinned the Colonel, imperturbably. 
“None of the states around here allow deer running 
with hounds ” 

“Scats cats! — That means the West, anyhow!” 
whooped Sid, triumphantly. “How about it, Scot- 
ty, eh?” 

“ ’Fraid it lets me out,” remarked the sandy- 
haired boy, quietly. “Fve got to be looking for a 
job these days.” 

Sid looked his sympathy and put his arm about 
Scotty’s shoulders. “We’ll manage it, somehow, old 
bunkie — never fear!” he said, consolingly. “It may 
be your last, — but we just got to have this one to- 
gether !” 

The Colonel smiled enigmatically. “Sure you’re 
going, Lester — job and all !” he assured him. “And 
how about training these pups, boys ?” 

Scotty couldn’t see it, but at least he would be 
glad to help train the dogs, anyhow, he reflected. 

7 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


It would give him some precious days in the moun- 
tains under tent cloth. How such vacations were to 
be treasured — now ! 

The Colonel took three pedigree certificates out of 
his desk drawer. “Pepper, Bourbon and Lee,” he 
read, naming the pups, “the markings will tell which 
is which.” Then he looked toward the house door 
of the Den like a guilty boy. “Boys — how will we 
— how dare we lead ’em in?” he whispered. “Your 
mother, Sid, knows nothing of this — and you know 
how she hates dogs !” 

The boy chuckled. The Colonel was in a worse fix 
than he ever had been facing Apache Geronimo! 
“Looks like they would have to live right here, sir!” 
laughed Sid, looking up from making friends with 
the first puppy. “Couldn’t wish for better den mates, 
I’ll say!” 

The Colonel knew more than either of the boys 
about the trouble he was getting into. That haunt- 
ing, houndy look in the pups’ eyes, as their long, 
silken ears drooped from high, pointed crowns, told 
him of a diabolical persistence and a wild, ineradi- 
cable thievishness that would play havoc with Mrs. 
Colvin’s domestic arrangements! You could feed 
them with a shovel and still there would be room 
8 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


for more. And, as to the neighbors' cats and chick- 
ens — he shuddered at the thought. 

“Well — we might as well have it out now!” he 
remarked, grimly, seizing the chains and pushing 
open the house door. 

A feminine shriek greeted him. “Where did you 
get those horrid dogs? — Send them away at once — 
I won't have them!" came Mrs. Colvin’s indignant 
protest. Pepper, the biggest of the trio, jumped and 
broke away at that moment, darting for the pantry 
door with the boys in hot pursuit. A wild African 
yell came from the kitchen where Aunty Sally was 
preparing supper. Then there was a crash of broken 
china, another war whoop, and Pepper came yelp- 
ing, booted through the door to dash under the 
dining-table legs. 

Aunty Sally charged wheezily after him. “He 
done broke de Dresden china bowl! — Dat ornery 
houn' dawg he done broke de Missus' china oyster 
dish !" she yelled. — “Whar he at ! — Let me beat him 
black an' blue!" 

A wail of anguish went up from Mrs. Colvin. 
The Colonel stood, thunderstruck and unhappy, 
yanking back on the chains of his other two leaping 
pups. Just then Pepper darted kiyi-ing from under 
9 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


the table and raced for the upstairs stairway. Aunty 
couldn’t reach him with her broom, but she whipped 
off a huge boot and hurled it after him, just miss- 
ing a Vernis-Martin glass cabinet by inches as Pep 
bolted up the stairs to hide under a bed, where the 
boys followed, howling with glee, to recapture 
him. 

Aunty Sally stopped and glared at the Colonel 
reprovingly. 

“Marse Colvin, you done got three of them 
thievin’, potlicker smell-dawgs ?” she accused, — “I’se 
shore ’shamed of you-all! — There, there, honey, 
don’t cry!” she soothed, taking Mrs. Colvin in her 
arms while the boys came back with Pepper, yelling 
with ungodly joy. 

“He’s gwine take them right out’n yeah, Missus, — 
or I don’t cook him another waffle — so there, Kuhn- 
nel, ’deed I isn’t!” she flared at him. 

Colonel Colvin’s jaw dropped as he stood irreso- 
lutely, with the pups winding their chains about and 
about his legs. Aunty Sally was an ancient institu- 
tion in the Colvin household. She had raised Sid 
from a baby, and had grown up with the Colvins 
since they had settled east. A power in the house- 
hold, he could not conceive how they were to get 

io 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


along without her, for no one else could cook any 
such waffles ! 

Then he beat a masterly and strategic retreat. “I 
guess it’s outdoors for them! ,, he surrendered, at 
discretion. “ We’ll build a kennel for them, right 
away — look out, Scotty! — there goes Bourbon! — 
Catch him, boys !” 

Scotty had volunteered to hold Bourbon, the sec- 
ond pup, but somehow his fingers had become re- 
laxed and Bourbon was off like a flash, darting for 
the pantry door where his nose told him there were 
eats. The boys followed on the run. They found 
the kitchen empty, save for an atmosphere of appe- 
tizing odors. No sign of the pup anywhere! 

They stood still and listened. Then a cold draft 
from somewhere led them to the back door of the 
kitchen. It stood partly ajar, and from outside came 
a swift lapping as of a dog’s tongue. Dashing out, 
there was Bourbon, standing in the snow, his nose 
deep in a huge tureen of chicken gumbo for the 
whole family, put out there to cool off ! It was red 
hot, but Bourbon was transferring it, as fast as he 
could make his tongue go. 

“Yeow !” whooped Sid, leaning up against Scotty, 
who leaned against him, weak from laughter. 


ii 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


“Come on — bring ’em out, Father — they might as 
well all finish it up, now !” 

“Coming — what’s the matter now?” called the 
Colonel’s voice as they heard him striding through 
the kitchen, accompanied by the hard click of horny 
hound nails. He opened the door, Pepper and Lee 
nearly yanking him off his feet as they both leaped 
for the tureen. The Colonel roared with Gargan- 
tuan laughter — the wild and woolly Outdoors had 
surely come again to Colvin House! There were 
feminine sniffs behind him, and another uproar from 
Aunty Sally, but the mischief was done. No ques- 
tion about Ruler’s pups getting theirs first, that 
night ! 

Be that as it may, they could get nothing further 
out of the Colonel but quizzical grins concerning the 
proposed hunting trip. Spring came and ripened 
into summer, finding him still sphinxlike. But every 
evening he kept them at mending tents and duffel 
and hunting clothes, while Pepper, Bourbon and Lee 
put weight on their black and tan bodies until they 
were great hulking things of over fifty pounds, lack- 
ing only hardening to make them full-grown dogs. 
Occasionally, when Scotty could get off from the 
job that he had taken in the bank, they went up into 


12 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


the mountains for a brief camp and a run for the 
dogs. Pepper saw his first deer. After that hunt 
the pups had to be chased, rounded up and chained 
in camp until it got to be a plaguy nuisance, no less ! 

Then came a letter from Big John that gave the 
Colonel's secret away. The boys found it lying open 
on the cedar log table in the Den, probably forgotten 
during some call into the house. 

“Got your letter telling how Jedge Hawkes is 
sending out Ruler and am sharpening up the camp 
axe," began the letter, as the boys giggled over this 
cryptic sentence. “Will be in Santa Fe Oct. i, and 
go on to Hinchman’s Ranch to see about hosses,” 
they read on with joyful eyes. Then they skipped 
away from the table, for the Colonel was coming 
back through the house door. He eyed them sus- 
piciously as his glance fell on the open letter. Then 
Sid burst into a whoop and threw his arms around 
him boyishly. 

“Oh, Dad ! — is it the Southwest ? Are we really 
and truly going to the Southwest?" he caroled. 

“Who said anything about the Southwest?" 
growled the Colonel, trying to twist down his lips 
under his white mustache. “You been reading my 
letters?" 


13 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


‘‘Couldn’t help it, Dad ! Gee, I can see those big 
hen-tracks of John’s ’way from here! And he’s 
going to meet us in Santa Fe, too — with Ruler!” 

“Who’s ‘us/ young man?” queried the Colonel. 
“Well ! I might as well tell you, now; and I’ll begin 
with Scotty. You wanted to go into mining, didn’t 
you, Scotty?” inquired the Colonel. 

“Yes, sir — but I can’t afford a technical college 
course, now,” said the boy, sadly. “Mother has 

nothing but her pension ” 

“Yes; but that will take care of her alone, son,” 
said Colonel Colvin kindly. “I don’t know but the 
best way to learn mining is the same as the way you 
learned soldiering, from the ranks up. I’m taking 
you to the best mining state in the Union, where 
you can handle the stuff right on the ground, find 
your own lodes, study mineralogy with the minerals 
in your own hands, — so you will know carbonate ore 
when you see it. That’s half the battle ; the technol- 
ogy of process work you can pick up right at the 
mines and mills. There’s lots of room for the young 
mineralogist who can go right along with his own 
saddle horse and outfit, take care of himself in a 
dry country, and know real lodes when he sees them. 
We’re going up through the eastern part of the 
14 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


Navaho reservation, where there’s pine forests. Big 
John used to punch cows down in that country; it’s 
an old story to him. We’ll explore some ancient 
cliff dwellings up in the Canyon Cheyo and then 
cross over to the Colorado and get up on the north 
rim of the Grand Canyon. That’s the best cougar, 
bear and deer country in the Southwest. How’d you 
like to camp in a rainless land, boys ? Where there’s 
no snow, no dreary northeasters, lots of queer new 
plants and trees that you never saw before, and 
where a man can ride like thunder on a hot cougar 
trail under great western pines! Where a brush 
sunshade is all the camp you need for weeks on end, 
and where you can loaf or explore or shoot or weave 
blankets or do anything you darn please, anyhow, 
any time! Something new, — eh?” 

“You said it. Dad ! Gee, I’ve just longed to camp 
out in that country, for once !” sighed Sid. “How 
about you, Les ?” 

“ ’Fraid I can’t,” returned his chum. “Gorry, but 
I’d love to, though !” he added, wistfully. 

“But you shall, my boy !” came back the Colonel, 
positively. “Your mother and I have talked it over. 
She has enough to live on with you away, and it 
will be a practical opening in mining for you. I 
15 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


know some big people down there in Prescott, and 
I know what I am talking about !” he insisted. 

Scotty leaped at Sid with glad enthusiasm. 
“Whee — yow!” he yelled. “Am I really going? — 
Thanks, Colonel, ever so much!” he gasped out, 
wringing his hand. “What do we take for outfit, 
sir?” 

“The little five-by-six-foot paraffined muslin wall 
tent for you two. Just a light tarp and my Army 
bedroll for me” — grinned the Colonel. “Otherwise 
your Montana outfits will do, just as they stand ” 

“What — in that hot country, Dad ?” inquired Sid, 
incredulously. 

“She’s cold enough, at night, son,” laughed the 
Colonel. “Those stag shirts and the canvas fleece- 
lined coats will come in mighty handy. Sid, you’ll 
take the .30 Government carbine, and Scotty the 
Doctor’s .405, while I’ll pack the old meat gun, the 
.35 Model ’95. Big John’s attending to the horse 
outfit.” 

“Cracky ! — Won’t it be some pickles to hunt with 
the old iron-man again, though! They say he did 
wonders in France,” cried Sid, all happy excitement 
over the prospects of going West again. 

“Sure did !” chuckled the Colonel. “There was a 
16 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


good story going around his regiment that they tell 
on Big John, boys. It seems they were in the middle 
of a charge, when someone yelled out — ‘Hey — Big 
John ! — shake off your bayonet — there’s three Boches 
dangling on it V ” 

“Reminds me of a dare-devil I had in my bat- 
tery,” grinned Sid. “That fellow, a big, red-haired 
Maine man, was afraid of nothing! During our 
Argonne advance we had a battery assignment with 
one gun to go right under a tree. The Boches had 
left a bomb there dangling from a branch by a rope, 
so that if you took it down it would surely go off. 
Up comes Mike, as we all stood looking at it, figur- 
ing out how to get rid of the thing. ‘Lave me at 
ut!’ says he, brushing the rest aside, and before I 
could yell out a word he had ripped it loose — every 
one scattering right and left — and then he hurled it, 
— and the thing went off in mid-air and liked to have 
blown down our tree !” 

“Great times you boys must have had!” sighed 
the Colonel, “but fighting was not so damn devilish 
in my day. Glad it’s all over, and we can get back 
to the clean joys of hunting again! We’ll get our 
hats in Albuquerque — wait till you see ’em ! A big 
Mex. sombrero, with a sugar-loaf crown and a brim 
1 7 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


a yard wide — unless things have changed from my 
old Apache days. And they don’t change, much, 
down there. New Mexico’s still half Spanish.” 

The boys realized that when, two weeks later, 
their transcontinental bade good-by to Colorado at 
Spanish Peaks and dropped down the old Santa Fe 
trail into New Mexico. Mesas, Indian pueblos still 
inhabited, and little Mexican ’dobe villages greeted 
them on every hand, keeping the boys continually 
crossing to opposite windows of their Pullman to 
stare out. This was not the old U. S. at all! It 
just couldn’t be! As the train climbed the grade 
toward Arizona, the country grew wilder and more 
desolate. Navaho and Zuni Indians came down to 
the stations to trade baskets and pottery ; the pueblo 
of Laguna rose close at hand; the high rock of 
Acoma, whose pueblo has defied the conqueror for 
centuries, was to be seen, dim and misty, down a 
bare valley. They saw a great natural bridge carved 
by water out of the solid cliff, and then, high above, 
the train passed those remarkable carved and pin- 
nacled buttes called Navaho Church, as the tracks 
dipped down-grade again, to follow the winding 
valley of the Puercos into Arizona. Bare and deso- 
late and empty and dry was that stream bed, with 
18 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


frightful bad lands rising across the river to the 
rim of a high plateau, fringed with scraggy timber. 

Shortly after dinner of that last day, the train 
slowed down to stop at a little water tank station. 
Hinchman’s Ranch could be reached, fory-five miles 
north from here. The boys searched avidly the little 
flat, back of the station, with eager eyes. It seemed 
a mile or so wide and was backed by rock-ribbed 
bad lands that ascended to the plateau. Whirling 
clouds of red dust, each the storm center of a cow- 
boy on a cayuse, smoked through the sparse grease- 
wood that dotted the plain, banging out a welcome 
with fanning revolvers. Alongside the track they 
spied Big John, mounted on a restive white wild 
mustang that had evidently only recently been “gen- 
tled,” for he seemed inclined to hop right over their 
locomotive. With him were two saddled ponies, 
evidently for them , and a big roan horse for the 
Colonel. Barking at the train was the largest and 
boniest hound the boys had ever seen. 

“That must be Ruler, Les — and there’s Big John 
with the horses — Gee — roo ! I want to yell ! — Can't 
we get this window open?” cried Sid excitedly. 

“C’mon, boys, grab your rifles and let’s vamoose,” 
called the Colonel, hustling out of the smoking com- 


19 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


partment with the stump of a black cigar smolder- 
ing under his white mustache. “Here, Sambo, fall 
on this duffel, boy.” 

They tumbled out of the vestibule and the Colo- 
nel, after a hearty handshake with Big John, hur- 
ried forward to see about their crate of dogs in the 
baggage car. 

“Hi, Sergeant Sid! — Gosh-all, but you do look 
nat’ral!” yelled Big John from the white horse, as 
Sid rushed across the cinder platform of the station. 
“Down, Ruler, down! — you ol’ pisen houn’ dawg!” 
he roared. — “An’ dam’f thar ain’t that ornery little 
shavetail Looie, Scotty ! Put ’er here, you li’l roos- 
ter! — Put ’er here!” chortled Big John, leaning far 
out of his saddle as the white horse braced against 
his weight on the stirrup. 

The boys fell all over one another shaking Big 
John’s huge paw. Except for a frightful shrapnel 
scar that seamed his face, he had not changed much 
since Montana days. The same big hawk nose, the 
same piercing black eyes and long, twirling mustache, 
the same intense black hair, under — yes, — the same 
old Stetson that he had worn in the Rockies ! Evi- 
dently the giant Montanan scorned the “greaser” 
hat of the Southwest. 


20 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


“Them black eyes and black hair of yourn, Sid, 
make you look like a reg’lar greaser under that dome ; 
— an’, gosh, ef he ain’t raisin’ a mw^tache,” guf- 
fawed Big John. “Scotty, you look like a red candle 
what’s hed a extinguisher set on to it,” observed the 
irrepressible cowman. “Otherwise the Colonel ain’t 
made no mistakes,” he added, sizing up their outfit 
critically. 

Just then that gentleman himself came down the 
platform, followed by two of the ranch teamsters 
carrying a huge dog crate. 

“Here, John, take a look at these pups!” called 
the Colonel, as the crate was set down and he fum- 
bled for his keys. Unlocking its door, Pepper, 
Bourbon and Lee climbed out and shook themselves 
all over. At sight of them Ruler bared fangs and 
flew at them. He didn’t know his own offspring! 
A furious dog fight ensued. They booted the dogs 
apart, and a growly peace was enforced; — in the 
midst of which there was a rapid clatter of hoofs 
and the two cowboys the boys had seen from the car 
window came loping in, to be introduced by Big 
John. 

“This here’s Red Jake, an’ t’other’s Mesa Joe, 
Colonel,” explained Big John, introducing them. 


21 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


“Up at Hinchman’s they just natchelly lives hearty 
on fried t’rantulas an' centipedes, reg’lar; but they 
ain’t nohow averse to eatin’ a baked Apache if they 
kin ketch one. The Colonel here, fellows, is one 
of the old original Geronimo hunters, — an’ these is 
his cubs,” concluded Big John, introducing the boys 
with a final wave of his hand. 

Red Jake and Joe grinned, but said nothing, as 
they shook hands all around. 

“Wait till we gets you out behind the bunk house, 
John!” muttered the red-haired one behind his hand, 
as they looked the Colonel over respectfully, glad to 
meet an old Indian fighter. Both were typical Ari- 
zonans, leathery and lean and sunburned, with hard, 
gray eyes all puckered from the constant desert 
glare. 

“Well, Sid, climb this here twister and we’ll get 
up the bad lands to the rim,” said Big John, as the 
ranch teamsters finished piling their duffel into the 
wagon. “All ready, sir?” — this to the Colonel — “we 
gotta make Navaho Wells by sundown.” 

Sid found that his pony was trained to start as 
soon as his foot touched the stirrup. His pinto bolted 
off with him, with the rest of the outfit strung after 
in hot pursuit. Presently the two Arizonans passed 


22 


WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST 


him like the wind, their horses thundering by in a 
cloud of dust. All Sid had ever dreamed about 
riding was nothing to this ! He yelled and waved his 
hat, whereat the “twister” rose and bucked and sun- 
fished, requiring an iron knee grip and a yank on 
his Mexican curb to bring him to earth again. 

With Ruler and the pups leaping around the 
horses’ heads, it was a furious race for a while, but 
then came the steep ascent through bare and hideous 
clayey ravines. Arrived at the top, the party stopped 
to rest the horses and there was a chance to look 
around. This was a mighty red and purple land, 
thought Sid, as his eyes rested, now on the snowy 
cones of the San Francisco peaks, a hundred miles 
to the west, now on the endless jumble of flat mesas 
to the north of him. It was a land of great hori- 
zontal ridges, yellow and red and blue and black; 
sloping up, sloping down, always in immensely long, 
gentle slants. And between them there were rocky 
talus beds strewn with pebbles and bowlders. Of 
vegetation there was almost none. 

Later the sage and greasewood became more 
abundant, and then, forty miles to the north, a ridge 
of pink layer-cake buttes jutted up into the clear 
air, with a faint tinge of green at their bases, along 
23 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


what was evidently a river bed. Here would be 
Hinchman’s Ranch. Sid reached for the cavalry 
canteen on his saddle hook, and turning, saw Scotty 
doing the same thing. 

“Here’s how, Pal !” he said ; “this is sure going to 
be one thirsty country, Les !” 


CHAPTER II 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 

** -EE them blue an’ white striped buttes 
yander, Sid?” asked John, pointing across 
the stony desert with his quirt. “That’s 
limestone, in these parts, an’ it ginerally means a 
tank ef thar’s any water at all. Navaho Wells is 
in there, and we’ll camp for the night.” 

“Just what I wanted — to have my first night in 
the desert out under the stars!” exclaimed Colonel 
Colvin, happily. “We stop here for the night, eh, 
John?” 

“Shore; no more water for twenty miles, sir. 
Them boys ain’t growed their saddle corns yet, 
neither, an’ they’ll be plumb glad to get down. I 
know how ’tis ! Thar’s a nice flat up on the buttes, 
Colonel. Dust off the t’rantulas and horned toads 
25 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


an’ rattlers off it, an* a man’ll sleep thar peaceful as 
a new borned babe.” 

Sid nodded approvingly. He was glad they were 
sleeping out, too. There couldn’t be too much of it 
for him! He said nothing about his aching knees, 
but his gait told the older men for him. He heeded 
no bodily aches, now, however, for a new and de- 
licious happiness was filling his breast and a load of 
worry was vanishing fast. His father, he could 
see, was fast picking up health and strength; had 
been ever since they had started on this trip. Thirty 
years ago he had ridden these same hills, with hostile 
Apaches ambushed in these very buttes. Sid could 
imagine those blue-clad, yellow-scarfed cavalrymen 
with their friendly Indian scouts and the plains- 
men rangers, all just like a Remington picture, 
painted with this place for a stage. In those days 
his father was one of the young lieutenants of the 
command. Now he could see the life-giving power 
of memory at work, for the strength of those rugged 
days seemed to be reentering the Colonel’s body and 
spirit. In two more weeks he would be heavy and 
lean and iron-hard. 

They headed the horses up a slope of the buttes. 
Its little flat commanded a magnificent prospect. 

26 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


Away to the west stretched line on line of stratified 
ridges, with the flat top of the Hopi mesa far on 
the horizon. To the east lay a silver-green flat of 
sage brush, bounded by jagged red peaks. Great 
woolly clouds rolled in rose and lavender masses 
over the bare rock saw-tooth ridges that filled in 
under the horizon. Water was there none, but of 
arid plant life there was abundance. 

“Here!” said the Colonel, looking silently across 
the desert, while memories of old Indian days 
crowded his mind, “it was right over there beyond 
those buttes to the east, that we of the Fifth Cavalry 
came down from Fort Defiance on our southward 
trail after Chief Chuntz and his Apaches, boys. A 
bad business ; but it had to be done, I suppose. Fll 
tell you of that cave fight, some day. This place 
is good enough for us, John.” 

Mesa Joe and Red Jake turned out the horses 
while Big John loped out into the sage to wait for 
the ranch wagon and get provisions and the sleeping 
gear from it. The boys set about cutting a quantity 
of sage bushes, from which they stripped a huge 
pile of fragrant browse. Colonel Colvin untied his 
cantle roll, and out of it took a six-by-nine foot light 
tarp, which was all the shelter he ever used. Set- 
27 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


ting it up with two stakes and its rear corners guyed 
to the rocky ledge back of the camp site, they had a 
sun shelter under which browse was spread out. The 
canteens were hung in a row in the shade, and out 
of the saddle bags of his McClellan army saddle the 
Colonel produced emergency rations that had been 
packed there in the Den, back home, before shipping 
the saddle out. There was bacon and corn meal, 
sugar and coffee,, and a can of condensed cream. 

Then the cowman came in and started a small 
fire of greasewood while Colonel Colvin produced 
an aluminum army mess tin with cover and folding 
handle, about nine by seven inches and perhaps an 
inch and a half deep. 

“Best little desert baker you ever saw, boys,” he 
laughed. “Many a corn cake I’ve shaken up in 
her!” He made a thick batter of flour, corn meal 
and baking powder, and poured the pan about half 
full. Balancing it on two stones over a bed of coals, 
he heaped a pile of live coals on the cover. In about 
fifteen minutes he brushed them off and peered in- 
side. 

“Brown as your hand! She’d go better with an 
egg beaten into the batter. Here’s for another 
one.” 

28 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


The boys were too tired and sore to do much 
beside watch the cake-making. When six of them 
were done, Big John came riding back from the 
ranch wagon that had gone into camp out on the 
flat. He had a bag of oats, a ham, and a sweating 
canvas bag of water hung to his saddle. 

“Shore, fill up the crowd with hog an’ hominy,” 
Colonel,” he grinned. “Ain’t nothing better’ n ham 
and com cakes been invented since Pharaoh missed 
the ford, I’m settin’ here to tell ye!” 

He got after the ham with his bowie knife, and 
soon a huge slice was sizzling in the Colonel’s mess 
kit. The boys went up on the rocks and watched 
the sunset, unwilling to miss a single moment of 
their first evening in the desert. A wild and beauti- 
ful land was this; color, — red and rose and purple 
and yellow, — with gleaming glories of the sunset 
tinting the cloud edges. Deep blue shadows crept 
out under the flanks of the mesas. All was still and 
silent; a peace passing understanding brooded over 
the whole world. 

“Gosh, but that’s wonderful!” exclaimed Scotty, 
fervently, as the sun plunged over the western rim 
of the world, striking turret and pinnacle and bastion 
alike brick-red in scarlet edgings of fire. “I tell you, 


29 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Sid, these moments are what we live for in the open ! 
Will we ever forget this scene ?” 

“Makes me feel calm, and serene, and — happy !” 
replied Sid, softly. “Happiness is what everybody is 
striving after — oh, so hard ! — and few or none ever 
have any. This is the secret of it, to me. A simple, 
healthful life in the open, and plenty of the big, 
beautiful outdoors to look at and wonder over,” 
concluded the youth, surprised at his own elo- 
quence. 

“You said it, Sid !” came the Colonel's deep voice 
behind them. “My happiest hours have all been out 
here, where a man can see a big enough chunk of the 
earth to realize his own insignificant place in the 
scheme of things. Back east we tend too much to 
magnify our own importance, and I always feel 
cramped and worried, and get pestered by trifles. 
No chance for that out here — in the presence of 
this!” 

He waved his arm to the west. Under a roseate 
afterglow the grand distances of the desert were 
bathed in a flood of purples and lavenders, with tints 
of deep orange on the mesa flanks to the west, while 
soft, tender shadows of misty blue filled the rugged 
valleys. They sat in silence, drinking it in, for such 
30 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


wine was good for the soul. The light of a distant 
watch fire on Walpi shone through the dusk, a tiny 
point of light fifty miles away. The Hopi Indians, 
at this time, were performing their mystic rites of 
the sunset, and a subtle comradeship with them 
reached out across the desert in the flicker of those 
rays 

“Chuck pile! — Come and get it!” rang out the 
mighty horn of Big John’s voice, breaking in on 
their reverie. The Colonel arose with a sigh of 
blissful content. “Seems like old times again, Sid ! 
Let’s eat hearty!” 

They climbed down to the little flat, where a 
thin wisp of gray-blue smoke rose straight up in the 
still air from the remnants of the cook fire. The 
boys fell on the ham and corn cakes and coffee rav- 
enously, batting off the four dogs, who were most 
oppressively sociable, trying to gobble morsels of 
food right out of their masters’ mouths. The stars 
came out while they were eating. Then Big John 
and the Arizonans fell over on their backs and lit 
indolent cigarettes ; the Colonel and the boys sought 
their lookout rocks, to feed on the desert, shrouded 
in its impenetrable gloom under a glory of western 
stars. 


3i 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


After a time the sharp night chill drove them 
under the shelter. Huddled forms out in the sage 
told of the cowmen fast asleep where they lay. Roll- 
ing in their blankets, the boys voted to call it a day. 
Sid lay awake, listening to the rustlings of a pack 
rat which had come foraging into camp, and enjoy- 
ing the wild howl of the coyotes barking in shrill 
chorus from the mesas all about them. It was all 
wild, lonely and beautiful — too beautiful for any- 
one but outers and very honest men, he decided, as 
he dozed off to sleep, with the sweet tang of sage 
in his nostrils. 

Next morning before dawn the whole party was 
awake, the boys shivering and glad enough to warm 
their hands before the fire. Bacon, flapjacks and 
coffee were in progress, and, downing them, the 
horses were unpicketed and fed and the whole caval- 
cade 'started for Hinchman’s. The sharp, bracing 
air was good for horses and men alike. They were 
full of oats and bacon and high spirits. Sid raced 
along with Scotty beside him, giving their ponies 
full rein to run off the first enthusiasm of a new 
day. Big John brought up the rear, singing a cow 
song at the top of his lungs, the meter chiming in 
with the jolt of his horse. 

32 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


“Whoo — pee, — de — I — yaho! Git along lit — tie dogie, 
For ’tis your misfortune an’ none of — my own ! 

Whoo — pee, — de — I — yaho ! Git along lit — tie dogie, 
For I know that Wy — O — ming will be your new 
home,” 

he sang, in a monstrous shout, bawling out the Fs 
and O’s in a blare like a foghorn. The boys giggled 
with joy as verse after verse of the cowman’s riding 
song roared out. 

“They sing that song to soothe the cattle when 
riding around the herd at night,” laughed Sid. “It 
sure carries well ! The cows are perfectly contented 
so long as they hear a human voice. Otherwise they 
are apt to get nervous about wolves, and stam- 
pede.” 

“What’s a 'dogie/ Sid?” asked Scotty, posting as 
his pony changed gait to a trot. 

“Oh, that’s a lean little yearling that they used 
to drive north to Wyoming, for Government rations 
for the poor Indians. Listen ” 

“Oh, you’ll be beef for Un-cle Sam’s Injuns, 

It’s 'Beef, — heap Beef!’ we he-ar them cry, 

Git along, git along, git along lit-tle dogies, 

For you’ll be beef steers by and by,” 


33 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


sang Big John’s concluding verse, Red Jake chiming 
in on the chorus, — 

\ 

“Whoop-ee, de — I — yaho!” etc. 

Sunrise over the desert ! A magnificent spectacle, 
a stunning spectacle, a gorgeous, overwhelming, awe- 
inspiring spectacle ! The boys fell head over heels in 
love with the whole thing, and then as if to give it 
a touch of adventure, Pepper let out a squeak, with 
a funny break in it like a boy’s voice changing, and 
streaked across the sage. After him tore Lee and 
Bourbon, belly down, legs flying like long broom 
handles. 

“Hi ! Hi ! Yip — yip! — Coyote !” yelled Red Jake, 
wheeling his broncho to flash off after the dogs. 
“Git him, boys !” 

Ruler brayed a musical volley of hound notes, 
taking after the pups in long bounds that closed up 
on them fast. A gray wolfish streak was doing some 
fancy steps, twisting and turning through the grease- 
wood bushes. Sid galloped, Scotty galloped; after 
them thundered Big John and the Colonel. The 
wind whistled around Sid’s ears as his pinto let out 
speed. 


34 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


“Run him down, fellers— watch out for prairie 
dog holes!” snorted Big John, swerving the wild, 
white horse to the left to cut across the coyote’s 
trail. The two Arizonans had fanned out in a wide 
bend ; Sid and Scotty jounced along together, paw- 
ing at their revolvers which were tightly jammed in 
the saddle holsters; the horses streaked along with 
a rapid clatter of hoof beats on the vast level floor 
of the desert, which was the stage setting for their 
coyote run. 

Sid yelled with glee. What a lot of room there 
was in this country! Bare mountains and mesas 
ringed the horizon, but for miles the flat, gray sage 
and green greasewood dotted the red sand. The 
dogs looked like little black specks, leaping and 
twisting through the low bushes. The whole plain 
was flat as a floor, and the horses under them reached 
out with flying hoofs in the unrestrained joy of rac- 
ing. Then a jack rabbit jumped from behind a sage 
bush, and the three pups dropped their hot coyote 
trail and started after him. 

“Wa — hoo! Stop them, boys!” roared the Colo- 
nel from his huge roan. “Break ’em of that!” 

He kept on after the coyote and Ruler. Sid 
tugged out his revolver and fanned the air ahead of 
35 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


the jack rabbit. His bullets threw up spats of white 
dust, and Pepper and Bourbon, who were yipping 
and squealing in hot pursuit, nearly turned somer- 
saults as a bullet threw a splash of sand right before 
their faces. The dogs leaped back, falling all over 
each other, and then the swift ponies wheeled around 
in front of them. Scotty leaned far out of his 
saddle with swinging quirt. 

“Back, Pep ! Out of that, Bourbon ! Nix on rab- 
bit! — Skip! — VAMOOSE !” he barked, lashing at 
them with his quirt. Sid thundered up on Pinto and 
they headed the pups and drove them back, whimper- 
ing and cringing, to where they had left the coyote 
track. The men were now at least a mile away across 
the level basin, stringing along with Big John’s white 
horse in the lead and Ruler far ahead of them all. 
The coyote was evidently headed for some craggy 
red sawteeth where he could make his escape from 
the horses uphill. 

The boys called off the pups and headed across 
the flat, hoping that the men would succeed in turn- 
ing the coyote. Then little puffs of white smoke 
came from the Arizonans. They could not hear the 
rifle shots, but they saw the coyote turn, bewildered, 
heading down their way in what looked like an easy 
36 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


lope. He saw them start their ponies into a gallop 
and again turned like a flash, evidently intending to 
cross the sage between the two parties. Pepper rose 
on his hind legs, got a sight of the coyote, and started 
in long bounds over the sage, with Lee and Bourbon 
at his heels. 

“Now!” gritted Sid. “Head him off, Scotty!” 
They raced across the coyote’s line. He was com- 
ing like the wind. Sid hauled Pinto up abruptly on 
his haunches and aimed his long-barreled Officer’s 
Model carefully. A spurt of dust sprang up just in 
front of the coyote. Sid held the round white bead, 
well down in its notch, just ahead of the flying, 
twisting animal, swung two yards ahead and fired. 
The coyote slid to his haunches, snapping savagely at 
a wound in his side, and then Pepper, Lee and Bour- 
bon fell on him in a riot of howls and barks. 

Sid whooped with joy as they rode down. This 
was fine medicine for those houn’-dawg pups! It 
was impossible to shoot ; the whirling mass of black, 
tan and gray was too swift and intricate to risk a 
shot into it. Came a rapid clatter of paws and a 
great, deep-voiced bray, as Ruler charged down the 
slope and pitched headlong into the fray. Out of 
it rose the coyote, borne aloft by the great bony jaws 
37 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


of Ruler about his throat. There was a savage 
shake, a worrying and growling from the pups, and 
then Red Jake clattered up, leaped off his pony, 
booted the dogs aside and finished the gasping coyote 
with a single revolver shot as it lay on its side. 

“That’s the stuff!” yelled Colonel Colvin, gallop- 
ing up on the roan. “Mind the dogs — they’ll be at 
each other next — they’re wild with fight !” He had 
scarcely spoken before Pepper flew jealously at Ruler 
with bared fangs, while Bourbon turned and pitched 
into Lee where he was worrying gleefully at the 
carcass. The boys dismounted with howls of laugh- 
ter and grabbed the belligerents by their collars. 

“Some pups, Dad! Hang on to him, Scotty!” 
laughed Sid, slinging Bourbon into the sage and aim- 
ing a kick at Lee. “First trophy of the desert, fel- 
lers!” 

“Nice li’l pasear,” remarked Red Jake, wiping the 
sweat from under his sombrero. “You-all want the 
hide off this-yere ?” he asked, looking to the Colonel 
for orders. 

“You bet! How far is it yet to the ranch, 
Jake?” 

The Arizonan puckered up his eyes as he scanned 
the far horizon where the colored buttes back of 
38 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


Hinchman’s loomed up. “Oh, ’bout eleven miles, I 
reckon/’ he decided. 

Sid and Scotty stared unbelievingly. Why, those 
red mountains couldn't be over five miles off ! Their 
knees ached from the unaccustomed saddle strains, 
but distances were deceiving in the desert and there 
was an hour more of riding yet. 

As they drew near the mountains, the long ’dobe 
walls of Hinchman’s suddenly developed out of its 
misty background of mountain, mesquite and cotton- 
wood. It looked more like a fort than any ranch 
the boys had ever seen before. Built during Apache 
times, its long outer walls were bare save for a few 
small black windows up near the eaves of the red 
tile roof. All around it was a bare, level space of 
desert, with not a single grease bush for cover. 
Even now the Navahos or the Apaches might tear 
loose again over some real or imaginary grievance, 
and Hinchman’s was an outpost in their country. 

The sharp clip-clop of their ponies’ hoofs rang 
on the stone flagging as they rode under the ’dobe 
arch into the big patio within the walls of Hinch- 
man’s. A couple of Indians took their horses as the 
boys dismounted and looked curiously around them. 
Here was a sort of square court, with a well sur- 
39 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


rounded by peach trees forming the center of the 
stone driving space. An inner wall, with Spanish 
tiled roof sloping inward all around, so as to turn 
the rainfall into the court drain cistern and also be 
protected from rifle fire, formed a side to the living 
rooms and stables that surrounded the patio. The 
windows in these were larger, but also more than 
man high, and each room had a door, mostly open, 
showing glimpses of the dark, cool depths within. 
In one of them stood a huge, white-haired giant wav- 
ing his arms joyfully. 

“Howdy, Colvin! — Howdy! Get right down! 
Sho’ is glad to see y’u!” roared the giant, running 
out to take the roan’s bridle reins. 

“How ! — Hinchy, — you old war-in-eye ! Gad, but 
you look good to me !” chortled the Colonel, wring- 
ing Hinchman’s hand. He leaped from his horse, 
and the two old Army comrades hugged each other 
in a ponderous bear dance about the patio. After 
an exchange of soul-satisfying punches the boys were 
introduced. They decided they were going to like 
this man. Black-eyed and long-nosed, he was all 
of six feet four in his boots ; his smile was constant 
and kindly, and there was a merry twinkle in his 
eye that matched the Colonel’s own. 

40 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


“Shore you look peaked, old-timer !” exclaimed 
Hinchman, searching the Colonel over with solici- 
tous eyes. “Look like you’d been dragged through 
a knot-hole, — Jeementley-ding if you don’t!” he 
cried, aggrieved sympathy in his tones. “Big John 
told me they’d worked you to death down in Wash- 
ington, but I never ’spected you’d look like this.” 

“Oh, I’ll be all right, pronto,” grinned Colonel 
Colvin. “There wasn’t any end to it, while it lasted, 
but it’s all over now, — thank God ! Enough of me 
— how’s everything with you, old settler? Still pa- 
triarch of all the Indians of this section?” he 
quizzed. 

“Still am !” rumbled Hinchman, emphatically. 
“I’m old 'White Father Hinch’ to all the Navaho 
north of us. They come to me with all their troubles 
or send in runners about it. One got in last night 
with a tough one for me to straighten out. It’s a 
medicine panther, Colvin, that’s been stealing old 
Neyani’s sheep. The Indians are all plumb scared 
of him ; heap big medicine ! They swear he’s black 
— can you beat that?” 

“Black!” echoed Colonel Colvin, incredulously, 
while the boys listened in with flapping ears. “Freak 
coloration, eh? The Far East has black leopards, 

41 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


you know, occurring clear down into Sumatra. It’s 
possible, Hinchy. Where did the cougar get the 
black on his ugly face? No one knows — nor why 
there are both black and spotted leopards, either. 
But I don't see where you should worry any, Hinchy 
— just say the word and we’ll go up there and shoot 
him for you. We've got dogs, you know." 

“Precisely just what you can't do, Colvin!" ex- 
claimed Hinchman, energetically. “It would be the 
worst kind of a sacrilege in the Navaho's eyes. 
You see, Dsilyi, the Navaho demigod, he had four 
panthers, a white one to the north, a tawny one to 
the west, a blue one to the south, and a black one to 
the east. The Indians just know that this is Dsilyi's 
black panther — there's no use arguing with them! 
Therefore, either old Neyani or his son, Niltci, has 
been up to some deviltry and the panther is being 
sent as a punishment. Not a redskin of the lot will 
shoot him on a bet, nor even dare track him. You 
don't know how superstitious they are, Colvin! 
Sooner than build a fire with a single stick from a 
hogan in which someone has died, a Navaho would 
freeze to death. Sooner than touch a hair of Dsil- 
yi’s medicine panther, old Neyani and his whole fam- 
ily would let him take all their sheep and starve to 
42 


ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 


death. Right nice mix-up fo’ me to unravel, eh?” 

“You’re dead right!” agreed the Colonel emphati- 
cally. “Say, the worst uprising the Army ever had 
to deal with came from just such a freak animal as 
this. You remember the Arapaho row in ’79, 
Hinchy?” 

“You bet! I sure hope this isn’t goin’ to be any- 
thing like that ! a white buffalo, wasn’t it ? And now, 
I’ve got a black cougar and a mess of Indian super- 
stitions on my hands !” 


CHAPTER III 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 

T HE older men went inside to Major Hinch- 
man’s big living room where, over some 
Mexican stogies, they discussed Neyani 
and his Black Panther and gossiped over old Army 
days. Sid and Scotty went out to help Big John 
with the horses and hounds and then explored the 
ranch patio. It was all as Spanish as old Mexico. 
Heavy and age-worn oak furniture — the real Mis- 
sion — stone me fates for grinding com, great red 
ollas or porous jars for cooling water by evapora- 
tion, striped serapes and Navaho blankets, Apache 
and Pima baskets; saddles, raitas and ornamental 
embossed Mexican leather gear — the horse was King 
here 1 The place reeked of those old strenuous bor- 
der days of the Southwest, and the ranch seemed to 
have imbibed equally of the customs and usages of 
44 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


the early Spanish and Indian possessors of the coun- 
try. In turn, the boys peeped in the various door- 
ways ; the farriery with a smoking forge and labor- 
ing bellows; the bunk house with an interminable 
game of greasy cards going on; the saddlery, where 
a weazened old sinner of a Sonoran bent over his 
leather work ; and the great kitchen, where dried beef 
and hams hung from the smoky rafters, and long 
braids of corn, peppers, desert onions and dried ber- 
ries festooned the walls. There were bins of pinyon 
nuts, flour, metate-g round Indian meal, sugar, cof- 
fee and red beans — the ranch could stand a year's 
siege if you asked Lum Looke, the Chinese cook 
who presided ! 

After a time Major Hinchman sought them out 
at the stables in the patio, where Ruler and his 
progeny had been made comfortable in an empty 
stall. 

“Say, boys," he grinned at them with a quizzically 
apologetic smile, “Pm mighty sorry — but thar ain’t 
a derned thing to eat in the ranch! Nope, not a 
doggone thing!" he insisted whimsically. “You’ll 
have to rustle your own grub. Now, Jake, thar, he 
was tellin’ me of a couple of deer over the river in 
those cottonwoods," he confided, in an elaborate 


45 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


stage whisper. “Suppose you boys get you* rifles 
an’ rustle us a little venison? You! — Jake!” he 
roared, seeing the delighted smiles on Sid’s and Scot- 
ty’s faces. 

Jake came straddling out of the bunk house, the 
sunlight sheening on his glossy black fur chaps as 
he crossed the patio. 

“Jake, you take these boys across the river and 
fetch us a deer,” he roared, turning to go back to 
the Colonel to continue their plans for the trip to 
come. 

A high-riding sun bathed the desert in floods of 
light and color as they rode out of the patio. The 
pink layer-cake mountains across the river rose high 
and near, now. Streaks of yellow and blue, in hori- 
zontal lines, crossed the uniform red of their bare 
and jagged conformation. From a bluff near Hinch- 
man’s they could survey a wide bend of the river 
(which was little more than a wide, fordable brook) 
and here was green grass land, with cattle dotted 
over it. Back of it was the corresponding bluff of 
the opposite bank, fringed with mesquite, oaks, cot- 
tonwoods, juniper and pinyons. 

“Over the river!” whooped Jake, settling back on 
his horse to let it slide down the clay bluff. A thun- 
46 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


dering clatter of hoofs came up behind them as the 
boys prepared to follow. It was Big John, racing 
along on the white horse. 

“Ain’t goin’ to leave me out, Jake, when it comes 
to the Colonel’s cubs !” he snorted, easing his mount 
down the slope. “You don’t know these pesky boys, 
Red. When I hed em, up Montana way, the minute 
they was out of my sight the dem pinheads would 
start somethin’! Now you take Scotty, here — he’s 
another red-head like you, Jake, — an’ I’ll sort of 
ooze along with Sid. Thataway we’ll keep the both 
of them out of trouble, — savvy?” 

“Shore! — We’ll pass a family of Apache Injuns, 
boys, on our way up to the notch in them buttes,” 
said Jake as the ponies splashed into the ford. “I’m 
not denyin’ Major Hinchman’s got the right idee 
about the Injuns, at that. He lets a few families 
of them stay on his ranch all the time, livin’ the way 
they is used ter, tendin’ a small herd of cow-critters 
in return for a beef steer now an’ then. Up yander 
is an ole San Carlos Apache chief, his squaw, an’ 
their two childer, — a young buck which same rides 
fer us, and a gal. ‘Snakes-in-his-leggins,’ we calls 
the ole Injun; but he’s a pow’rful dignified ole cuss 
at that.” 


47 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


They rode up the opposite bluff and along its 
brink for perhaps a mile, the boys agog with curios- 
ity to see Apache Indians in their native state, so to 
speak. The thick growth of saw grass, clumps of 
yucca, agave, and sage increased as they rode along, 
while nearly every glade held a sparse growth of 
green deciduous trees. And then, on a point of the 
bluff jutting out toward the river, they came upon 
the Apache home. It was a mere sun shelter of 
poles and juniper, but the squaw and her daughter 
were at work on a grass hut near by, made of tall 
looped poles forming a system of arches and tied 
with yucca fiber at all crossings. The girl was bind- 
ing on a thatch of bear grass in bundles. By the 
time the rains came it would be fairly waterproof. 

Under the juniper shelter was the simplest of 
furniture. A few red and black blankets hung up 
on the leafy walls to be out of the dirt ; a red pottery 
jar slicked over with pinyon gum varnish held fresh 
water; there were woven baskets in geometrical 
black and white figures holding pinyon nuts ; strings 
of red peppers and onions, and braided spikes of 
blue and red corn ears hung from the rafters. Dried 
meat and fish swung under the eaves, while the old 
buck himself sat in the shade, straightening cane 
48 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


arrows with a grooved stone which he had heated in 
his fire. He grunted with imperturbable dignity as 
they rode up. 

“Nothing to do till to-morrow, eh, Sid?” grinned 
Scotty as they reined in. 

“It looks ideal to me !” responded Sid, enthusias- 
tically, the wild blood surging up in him sympatheti- 
cally at the fine simplicity of the old Indian’s life. 
“He’s making those arrows because they are far 
cheaper than cartridges, and just as effective for 
him. I suppose they sell those baskets — look at that 
one like a tall vase; isn’t it a beauty?” 

The old squaw looked up from her work and 
smiled at Sid’s eager, pointing finger. Back of her, 
down on the river flat, the young buck had just rid- 
den up, bare-backed on a pied pony. He had noth- 
ing on him but a breech clout, buckskin beaded moc- 
casins of brilliant blue and white, and a red bandanna 
about his forehead. He grinned silently at the boys 
as his pony stopped. 

“Gee, I’m goin’ to be an Indian!” laughed Sid. 
“I’ll build a whicki-up of my own and live here for- 
ever! I’m an adopted Blackfoot, anyhow.” 

“Why don't you be an ethnologist, Sid?” urged 
Scotty, inspired by his chum’s enthusiasm. 

49 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


“Gee-roo, I’d be more than that!” came back Sid. 
“Instead of just studying their songs and customs, 
I’d want to do something practical toward letting 
the Indian live in his own way. It’s the only thing 
that will preserve the race contented and happy.” 

“How, Snakes! — You happy?” chuckled Jake, 
calling out to the old buck at Sid’s words. 

The Apache lifted his great head, and a coppery 
grin broke on his eagle features. “Plenty happy!” 
his deep bass voice replied. “Major Hinchm’n heap 
good to red man !” 

“Yet this ole redskin and yore pappy and Major 
Hinchman, Sid, was on the war path after each 
other, red hot, only forty years ago! Waal; times 
hev changed! We must be oozin’ along, now, or 
there won’t be no deer on the saddle, boys.” 

“You see how ’tis,” said Jake with obvious pride 
in his master’s system as they rode off, “them Injuns 
is happy, clean through. ’Cause why? They’ve got 
their freedom, an’ can live as they likes. Ef every 
ranch in Arizona would adopt a few, we’d have no 
need for reservations, whar they’re always discon- 
tented. It don’t take much to feed an Injun an’ 
keep him happy. That young buck’s as good a 
herdsman as we’ve got. The squaw makes baskits, 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


an’ the ole feller does a bit of huntin’, mostly sage 
hens and jacks. They’re wuth their keep ; yit we kin 
sorter look after ’em if they gits into any trouble. 
That’s what Hinchman’s preachin’, everywhar he 
goes. — Whoa, boys! We pickets the horses here, 
fellers, an’ gits up this coulee afoot after them deer,” 
he broke off, throwing a leg over his mount. 

They picketed the ponies out in a bit of grass 
swale, and separated, going in pairs up different 
flanks of the red butte. The sparse mesquite and 
bear oak grew stunted and thick, up here, and it 
was all cut up with little ravines of dense clay soil 
and friable rock. Moisture and dew from the river, 
condensed at night, evidently kept it going, for even 
cottonwood grew in the depths of the gullies. 

“Good deer country, son, — for these parts. They 
lies low up here and comes down at night to drink. 
Watch out for a track in the clay,” cautioned Big 
John as he and Sid climbed along, rifles at ready. 

A blue-tailed, green lizard darted across their 
path. Sid was watching it disappear under some 
loose stones, when the sudden “Whew! Whew!” 
of a startled deer made him jump with rifle half to 
shoulder. 

“Arter him! — up thet draw!” barked Big John, 
5i 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


jumping for the ravine as the patter of quick hoofs 
died away over the ridge. Sid swarmed up the 
rocky talus while Big John leaped in giant strides 
along the flanks of the ravine. It seemed to Sid 
that a quick climb to a jutting shoulder above him 
would give him a shot, especially if the deer stopped 
to look back after his first fright was over. The 
loose soil rolled and slid under his feet; high above 
him towered the red wall of the butte, vertical and 
unscalable. When he at length turned to look 
around, he was high on the roof of the desert, its 
tumbled ridges stretching away to the south for lim- 
itless miles. Down below was the curving bend of 
the river and across it the low, square, ’dobe fort 
of Hinchman’s. Then he turned his back to it all 
and began to reconnoiter cautiously over the ridge. 
As he raised his head, the wag of a white flag told 
him that the deer had seen him, too. He was a large 
buck, an eight-pointer at least, and he was galloping 
up a vast arroyo that cleft into the heart of the 
mountains. Sid raised his rifle and opened fire at 
long range. 

“S. pang ! S pang ! S pang !” whipped out the sharp 
reports, as fast as he could work the lever. 

“Whoop-ee! Bum ’im! Set fire to ’im!” roared 
52 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


Big John's voice in the ravine, and then he burst 
out of the head of it, looking for the buck. 

Sid saw his bullets strike rock in red spurts of 
dust. The ringing reports of Big John's rifle now 
added their clamor to the din. Far off up the canyon 
the buck stumbled and fell; got up and went on 
again, and then leaped high in the air with all four 
feet and came down on his side. 

"That got him!” yelled Big John. “I don't know 
which one of us 'twas. Come on down, son, — 'twon’t 
be no pyjama party gittin' him out of thar, old set- 
tler!” 

While Big John was paunching the buck, Sid 
climbed up to the head of the canyon, led on by an 
irresistible desire to see what might be on the other 
side of the top of the world. The ledges of broken 
and wind-scoured rock gradually gave place to 
shelves with vertical faces, up which he could find 
crevices or breaks which could be climbed. The 
blue margin of the sky was not far above him, now. 
Scaling the last bastions of the ridge, he found him- 
self perched up on a sharp knife-edge, seemingly 
only a little below the white clouds overhead. The 
dry desert winds sang in the peaks around him and 
caressed him with soft, invisible fingers. He felt 
53 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


somehow brother to it all, as his eyes roved around 
the horizon. To the north stretched the flat plain 
of the desert, broken with sheer walled mesas and 
ragged outcroppings of rock ridges. To the east 
rose a high-walled plateau, covered with the dark 
green of arid-country evergreens, — cedar, pinyon 
and juniper. It ran for miles and miles northward, 
and in between him and it a purple void told of the 
chasm of some valley flowing north. 

It was through that plateau of pine timber that 
their route north to the Canyon Cheyo would lie, 
and somewhere, cut deep in the plateau, would be that 
valley of the ancient cliff dwellers that they all wished 
to see. As Sid studied the huge panorama an over- 
whelming desire for solitude came over him. He 
wanted to be alone, to take for himself the Indian 
boy’s three days of trial and to face life and his 
future for a time with wide open eyes, alone and un- 
counseled. Like them, he wanted to ask questions 
of life and learn what it all was going to mean for 
him. Here, in this empty land, he could face Mother 
Earth, Mother Nature, the raw essentials of life, and 
let his own soul choose his destiny. 

The Indians, he knew, encouraged this impulse in 
boys of his age. Then it was that they went alone 
54 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


into the mountains, to fast and pray to the Great 
Mystery, and to come back to the tribe with the 
beginnings of wisdom deep planted in them. The 
whites stifled this desire for solitude, attempted to 
guide their boy’s every step, and more than often 
hopelessly muddled his whole life in advance for 
him. Sid would have none of that! Never once 
had the old Colonel so much as hinted to him what he 
was to be and do, in this his life that stretched be- 
fore him. His boy was free to face it in the only 
way it could be faced, alone. Sid wanted to think 
it out by himself, to be away from the very sight of 
people, to have these great solitudes for his coun- 
selors for at least a few days. He climbed back 
down the canyon and rejoined Big John, turning 
over the desire in his mind. He did not realize 
that the Desert had taken hold of his soul with its 
grip of the infinite, — as it has done to the mind of 
man since countless ages, — but, true to instinct, he 
was following its silent beckoning. 

“John, I’m thinking of doing a little pasear up into 
the mountains for a day or so, — by myself/’ he an- 
nounced, as the cowman looked up from cleaning his 
gory hands with a few drops from his canteen. 

Big John looked him over quizzically. 

55 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


“How ’bout me, old-timer ? Colonel Colvin’ll skin 
me like a mule team ef I comes back without ye!” 

“Dad’ll understand — and I know you do. This 
country’s got me, John ! I’m just crazy to do a lone 
hike in it, for a while. Suppose you fellows pick 
me up in the Canyon on your way north? I’ll be 
there, and ready for you ’bout that time.” 

Big John grinned, as he scratched the black locks 
under his sombrero. “You ain’t, nohow, regular 
intimate with that region, is yer, Sid?” he inquired, 
blandly. 

“No, but it’s a canyon, like all the rest of them, 
with sheer walls and a lot of prehistoric cliff dwellers’ 
places in it, isn’t it?” said Sid, confidently. 

It is to be presumed that some of the Arizona sense 
of humor was infecting that stanch Montanan, Big 
John, for all he said was, “All right, old-timer! 
Make it the mouth of the Monument Canyon, 
though, so we can find ye when we want ye. . . . 
I’ve hed that lonesome itch myself, son. You hev 
your blanket and tarp on the pinto’s cantle, and 
here’s a haunch of venison. Ef you only hed a bag 
of pinole, now, I’d be plumb willing to turn ye 
loose.” 

“I have,” remarked Sid, turning around to show a 
56 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


buckskin bag at his belt. “Parched and ground corn. 
You eat a tablespoonful of it and wash down with 
a drink, — and you’re fed for at least six hours to 
come. Scotty and I made a lot of it back east.” 

“Smart ez lightnin’, you two!” chuckled Big 
John, shaking his head. “After them Montana 
days, though, I’d trust ye anywhar, Sid. Sho’ — 
they ain’t nawthin’ to harm you, from here to the 
Canyon. Git along, son — don’t I know jest what’s 
eatin’ ye ! The Colonel kin take it out on me — I’ll 
fix it with him! You help me down with this yere 
critter, and I’ll start ye on the trail.” 

Between them they got the buck down the slope, 
and then led the horses up through the ravine to 
where the buck could be easily slung. Big John 
then shook Sid’s canteen, looked over his saddle 
trappings, and cut off a haunch of the venison and 
they slung it to Sid’s saddle bow opposite the can- 
teen. 

“See thet notch, up thar in them buttes to the 
east, Sid?” asked Big John, pointing with a homy 
finger. “This here trail goes up thar, over the di- 
vide. Folly it down ’til you comes into Red Valley. 
This time o’ year thar ain’t much water, but thar’s 
plenty of tanks, — pools, like, — whar the water lays 
57 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


in rocky holes. Stick to the valley till you comes to 
the Canyon. We'll be along thar in about two days. 
So long, kid ! Hev it out with yourself, son — 'twill 
do ye good !" 

He mounted his horse, with the buck tied across 
the saddle, and waved a farewell as Sid rode off 
up the steep trail from the river. 

Up through a country of bear grass, sage and 
mesquite he rode, following a well-worn trail. Once 
over the divide, the way led all down hill. The junh 
pers and pinyons thinned out; yuccas and century 
plants sprang up among the bear grass, and then, 
riding out from the last fringe of trees, a mighty 
red valley lay before him, stretching endlessly north- 
ward in yellow and blue and black parapets, with 
sage-strewn slopes of gravel slanting downwards 
from their walls. Sid let out a wild whoop of joy 
as his pony cantered down the winding trail. Free! 
He was as free as that eagle that soared high above 
him in the blue — so high as to be a mere wheeling 
speck in the sky! He was alone with himself and 
Nature. 

The pony slowed down as he reached the hot 
depths of the valley. A dry scoured-out bed of 
a brook wandered below; here a scummy, shallow 
58 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


pool, yonder the glimpse of shining water where 
a deep hole in the rocks still held some. None of 
the thirst terrors of the desert would be his, reflected 
Sid, as he rode by them; nothing but this inspiring 
high horizon of a changeless land. Here was the 
seat of the Infinite, thought the boy, the same last 
year, the same last century, — the same since the 
great waters had left this basin bare back in geologi- 
cal time. Of what other place in our country could 
that be said? The forests and the Indians of the 
East were gone forever; the prairies and the buffalo 
of the West were gone. Millions of white men were 
toiling and struggling to make a living crowded in 
cities which dotted that land where once was the 
bounteous plenty of Nature. All the men he knew 
were fighting a grim battle with Life, just to keep 
fed and clothed and have a roof over their heads. 
All the boys he knew were training for that same 
battle. All of them were tired and weary, and none 
really enjoyed their lives. All of them would go 
to their graves with the bitter sense of not having 
lived at all. None of that for him! 

And why? puzzled Sid. Well, their lives were all 
too complex, for one thing. A thousand distractions 
pressed in on everybody’s time. There was no mar- 
59 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


gin to their lives; no time for ease, for reflection, 
for communing through books with the great spirits 
of the past. None at all for those revitalizing pe- 
riods when man returns to Nature and is bora anew. 
These people spent so much of their time trying 
to live that they did not live at all! Only worked. 

What, then, was happiness? The happiest man 
Sid knew was a young fellow he had met out in 
Montana, who worked among the homesteaders out 
in the new red wheat lands, where there was not a 
school or a church in forty thousand square miles. 
Amohg those brave and cheerful folk he was giving 
his life with a rich enthusiasm, that their sons might 
have something of an education. And his idealism 
was so infectious, too, that he had persuaded a young 
medical student to go out there with him, so that 
there might be at least one doctor in all that terri- 
tory. 

Another fellow that he knew, quite as happy, was 
an outdoor artist who sought out and painted the 
wild beauty of this beautiful world in which we live. 
This fellow lived up in a log cabin on a Wisconsin 
reservation, painting the life of the forest. He 
knew animals, fish, game, birds, canoes, Indians, 
woodsmen ; and he knew how to paint them so that 
60 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


one looked and was transported to his scene in the 
very spirit of it. In the fall he would shoot game 
and cure it, collect wild rice and Indian potato, and 
stay right there, painting the forest in winter when 
it was more beautiful than ever. One exhibition of 
his pictures a year was all he needed to provide for 
his simple wants. Thoreau loved to study; he was 
happiest when he had the leisure to read the Scrip- 
tures of the ancients in their original tongues, to 
search for great truths and sound philosophies and 
pass them on to his fellow men. To get the freedom 
to do this he had lived alone in the forest and raised 
from the soil what he needed to eat. 

These men were not complex. They did not 
want a million things that people think are neces- 
sary to happiness. So long as they were free to keep 
on, they had all that they asked of life. It struck 
Sid that the master key of all this was for a man to 
find the work that he loved and then be free to do 
it. If the work itself was such that it set a high 
ideal before him, then that man would be happy. 
Nothing else mattered. Nothing else should matter. 
It was essential to bar out the distractions, the mean- 
ingless nothings that frittered away one’s time, 
money and energy. The men of the desert came out 
61 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


here to get away from all that, to devote their lives to 
some large, simple business, like raising cattle or 
making the desert bloom by systems of irrigation. 
And they found the grand peace of the desert good 
for the soul. Good enough to stay here forever — 
in what looked to a city man a hideous, iron-bound 
land — and never have a wish to go back where men 
spoiled everything in their mad scramble to stay 
alive. 

Sid decided three things for himself during the 
miles that Pinto laid behind them with that tireless 
gait of the plains mustang. Happiness, for him, lay 
close to Nature. She was by far the grandest thing 
in the world, the one thing of which he never tired 
and of whose wonders there was no end. Others 
might prefer the intellectual life of cities, where the 
body was forever weary, forever crying for good, 
healthy, sweating exercise, even if the mind was 
kept occupied. To satisfy them both and be a whole 
man, happy all over with the thrill of good health 
of mind and body, a life in the open was the only 
surety. That other life would be surely a misery 
for his body, caged like a setter dog in a city flat — 
there would be absolutely no escaping it. For his 
mind it would mean simply an exchange of interests, 
62 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


working with live things as the raw material instead 
of with machinery or in spending his days dictating 
letters, which was the bulk of the “work” done by 
most of the men he knew. He shrank from such a 
life as from a plague. Far better to be just reason- 
ably well off, or even poor, than exchange for a 
heaping measure of dollars everything that gave one 
joy in living. Life in the open, for him, could be 
agriculture or mining or ethnology. The human in- 
terest of the latter inclined him strongly toward it. 
It combined idealism with practical, useful work. 
To make others happy, to help the misunderstood 
and protect the unjustly treated — that would be a 
life that could appeal to Sid’s generous, open-handed 
nature ! 

He had arrived at that point in his reflections and 
his pony had rounded perhaps the fiftieth of the 
great red parapets and promontories that criss- 
crossed ahead of him in the winding valley, when 
two enormous red walls, flat as masonry and hun- 
dreds of feet high came to view across the dry bed 
of the stream. 

Sid reined up his pony, looking up at them in 
wonder, and then at the dim distances beyond with 
a feeling of utter bewilderment. Surely this was a 
63 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


grim joke that Big John had played on him, — the 
merciless Arizona humor as practiced on the abysmal 
tenderfoot ! 

“This must be the Canyon Cheyo, and those huge 
walls are ‘Los Capitanos del Canyon/ as the Spanish 
named them — but where is the entrance ?” he asked 
himself, perplexedly. Then the truth burst upon 
him. That line of dim gray cliffs, apparently five 
miles down the valley was the other wall of the 
Canyon ! The whole thing was its mighty gate ! 

“Gee-roo! Things are done on a big scale out 
here! ,, exclaimed Sid as he surveyed it, dismayed. 
“You could drop a whole eastern state in the mouth 
of this canyon and it would never be missed! No 
wonder there are whole ruined cities on the floor as 
well as the walls of Cheyo !” he cried, ruefully, as he 
began to wonder how his party would ever find him 
in all this vast expanse of cliff and valley. 

But it would narrow further up, he reassured 
himself. If he could find the mouth of Monument 
Canyon and hang around there they would surely 
pick him up. For miles he rode up a flat level floor, 
green and watered with a brook, while on both sides 
frowned parapets like the Palisades of the Hudson, 
about the same height, yet narrowed in closer, so 
64 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


that their grandeur and majesty hemmed him in. Up 
under the sheer cliffs he could see great hollo wed-out 
caves, with stone ruins peeping out under them, walls 
shattered and tom, square stone watch towers with 
their upper stories thrown down, and a detritus of 
destroyed masonry scattered down the steep, tree- 
grown slopes. 

Then a narrow side canyon attracted him. It 
would be fun to ride up to it and camp there for 
the night, thought Sid, besides being out of the main 
canyon and away from possible visits of passing 
Navahos who might take into their heads to rob a 
lonely boy camping out. He turned up it, winding 
his pony through great spruces and firs that rose 
out of its moist bottom, watered by a little runnel. 
The stratified stone ledges of the cliffs were moss- 
covered at their bases. High up through the cleft 
he could see the blue sky, with yellow sunlight strik- 
ing the spires of western yellow pines that seemed 
like pygmy Japanese trees up there from where he 
was. It was already dim down in here. 

Swiftly the twilight grew, while the pony slowed 
to a walk, his feet not making a sound in the soft 
duff. It was growing eerie and mysterious in here, 
thought Sid, as a slight shiver ran through him, and 
65 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


he now wished he had stayed out in the open valley. 
But he fought back that wish as cowardly and fool- 
ish. Men did not turn back from what they had 
once set their hand to ! 

Then a stick cracked, somewhere behind him. Sid 
reined up and listened. All was still as death ; even 
the birds had gone to roost in the dim twilight of 
the chasm. But Pinto’s actions told him that that 
noise was not imagination. His pony’s ears lay 
flat back and he was shivering all over with fear ! 

Sid watched, intently, down the chasm. He 
thought he saw a bush move. A second’s concen- 
tration on it told him it had moved, for the tips of 
its lower branches still vibrated. He reached down 
and drew his army carbine out of its scabbard. For 
some minutes Sid watched the bush, his heart beat- 
ing with excitement. A more experienced man than 
he would have hummed a shot into it to smoke out 
whatever might be lurking there. 

But after a time he turned away and urged the 
pony slowly ahead. The horse jumped as the spurs 
touched him, and Sid had a wrangle to quiet him 
at all. They paced on, slowly, both listening behind 
them, for Pinto’s ears had not pricked forward at 
all. An uncanny sense that they were being fol- 
66 


THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS 


lowed, — by something — in the chasm, persisted. 
Several times Sid looked back, rifle at ready, urged 
by some half -heard noise. 

A likely camping spot, a little dent in the chasm 
walls showed up ahead, and, as it was getting dark, 
Sid decided to stop here and make camp for the night, 
still keeping a wary eye out for whatever beast it 
was that was stalking them. 

He dismounted and picketed Pinto in a little grass 
swale. Then he cleared away a space for his fire in 
the needles that lay under the clump of silver spruces 
in the dent. He was gathering sticks for it when 
Pinto gave a snort of terror and tugged frantically 
at his halter. Sid yelled at him, for his eyeballs 
showed white with fright. He snatched up his rifle 
to peer down the chasm. Then a shock of alarm 
went through him, as his eye fastened on a motion- 
less head — looking at them from over a ledge that 
jutted out from the canyon walls high up. Big, 
round, and coal-black it was! No ears showed — 
they must have been laid back flat — but a green and 
phosphorescent flash came from the two eyes in it 
that glared at them. 

Sid's rifle sprang to shoulder and the red spurt of 
flame from its muzzle split the semidarkness. 

67 


CHAPTER IV 


LOST CANYON 

F OR the next few seconds after that rifle shot, 
Sid was fully occupied. The black head, 
whatever it was, disappeared in the cloud of 
smoke from the rifle muzzle, and Sid heard a hoarse, 
ropy, animal snarl and a scramble in the bushes up 
on the cliff ledges. But Pinto had reared high in 
the air at the shot, and, with a whinny of terror and 
a frantic tug of his head, had broken the picket 
lariat. He dashed snorting across the ravine. Sid 
dropped his rifle and fell on the dangling lariat weav- 
ing like a snake through the grass. It whipped out 
from under him as he made a last snatch for it and 
a half hitch of it caught around his wrist. 

Sid was yanked to his feet, hauling against the 
plunging horse, and was dragged across the chasm. 
68 


LOST CANYON 


Only its sheer wall stopped Pinto in his mad frenzy 
of backing. Sid snubbed the lariat around a stump 
and let Pinto buck. Gradually the horse grew quiet 
as Sid talked to him, and he finally was able to come 
up on the rope and soothe him. The pony shivered 
with terror, but slowly became more easy, pricking 
his ears and looking with alarmed eyes down the 
chasm every time the thought of that creature that 
had peered out at them recurred to his equine brain. 
Sid led him over to the grass swale, where he fell to 
grazing again. After a time the pony seemed to 
know that their visitor had gone, for, save for an oc- 
casional stoppage to look long and intently, he went 
on feeding. 

But that was no guarantee that the prowler might 
not come back again, sometime during the night, 
reasoned Sid. 

“Bear or cougar, what he wanted was horse flesh !” 
muttered the boy to himself as he started his fire. 
“Let’s see; the Navaho hogans are not so far from 
here, up near the head of the Canyon to the east. 
That’s about eight miles. Suppose this brute was 
that freak panther that we heard about at Hinch- 
man’s? Of course, it was dark and I might have 
been fooled, but he was black, whatever the thing 
69 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


might have been. It couldn’t have been black bear, 
or I’d have noted his ears. This thing had no ears, 
— and it looked catty! By George — suppose it is 
the Black Panther ! The black leopards of the East 
are always larger and heavier than the spotted and 
clouded kinds, so this fellow must be an old Tom 
cougar, a lover of horse, deer and sheep. What’s 
to prevent him coming back and getting Pinto be- 
fore I can wake up to shoot him?” 

Sid puzzled a long while over what to do, as he 
squatted before his fire broiling a slab of venison 
from the haunch. He munched at it and then 
washed down a liberal help of pinole with brook 
water, still undecided. There did not seem to be any 
solution for this particular difficulty. 

“Well, there’s one thing about it — Pinto’s as good 
as a watch dog,” said Sid to himself. “He’ll stay up 
all night, munching grass, if I know horses,” he 
laughed, “and he’d sense that cougar around long 
before I could. . . . I’ve got it !” he cried, slapping 
at his knee delightedly. 

He pulled up the picket pin and drove it in again 
under the spruces beside the bed of dry needles 
among some rock hummocks that he had selected 
for a sleeping place for himself. Then he retied 
70 


LOST CANYON 


the lariat, so that there was a short length left over, 
and this he fastened to his bed roll. 

“There!” he exclaimed. “If Sir Black Panther 
comes, Pinto’ll plunge and rear and pull out his pin, 
all in about one jump. Then the lariat will yank 
the bed out from under me — enough to wake up a 
dead man — and I ought to be up and shooting 
mighty sudden!” With that he leaned the rifle 
handy against a spruce and rolled up in his blankets 
on the needle bed. The last sound that drifted to 
his ears was the steady munching of Pinto, as un- 
ending as the murmur of the rill in the ravine. 

Next morning Sid awoke with a sense of having 
missed something. Wasn’t there to have been a row 
with a cougar that was to come and take his horse? 
But there stood Pinto, grazing peacefully. Birds 
chirruped in the firs and spruces growing in the 
chasm ; the sunlight streamed down through its silent 
cathedral walls; a water ousel was bathing himself 
in a pool of the brook and thanking God for the 
gift of another sunny day. All was peace in the 
glory of the morning. The uncanny visitor had not 
come, then! Sid lay lazily awake for some time, 
enjoying it all. The only sounds, save the soft 
soughing of the wind in the evergreens, were the 
71 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


ceaseless runnel of the brook, the liquid notes of the 
birds, and the champing of Pinto’s teeth on the grass 
beside camp, clearly audible in this vast stillness. 
It recalled Sid’s thoughts to desire for breakfast. 
He was not quite ready for the frontiersman’s fare 
of straight venison and pinole! Coffee and bacon 
with it loomed up in his mind as much more savory 
and palatable. And that brought him to remem- 
brance of his emergency ration. The boys never 
went abroad without it. It ought to be in a canvas 
pouch on the back of his belt, reflected Sid. Reach- 
ing around, he was surprised to find it still there, 
utterly forgotten and no doubt slept upon in the ex- 
citement and fatigues of the day before. 

Sid unbuckled his belt and slipped it off. It was 
a home-made affair, merely an empty cocoa tin with 
two holes punched in its upper rim and a small bale 
wire packed inside with the grub. It held a half 
pint of water when filled. Out of it Sid took a 
package of coffee, lumps of sugar, a paraffin paper 
package of bacon slices, a small tin box of salt, and 
a cube of dried soup powder. The cover of the tin 
had a tack hole in one end, so that it would make a 
small frying pan by tacking the tin to the end of a 
stick. With a small fire going he soon had coffee 
72 


LOST CANYON 


brewing in the can and four slices of bacon were 
crisped in the cover. Then washing down a spoon- 
ful of pinole, he was ready for further adventures. 
He was packing up the emergency kit and drowning 
the remnants of his fire with water carried from the 
brook, when to his surprise the soft duff under his 
feet gave way with a crackling of rotten twigs, and, 
before he could right himself, his boot was jammed 
down in a cleft of mossy bowlders whose humpy 
forms showed irregularly under the needle floor of 
the cove. Sid had spent considerable effort the night 
before in trying to find a level place to sleep on be- 
tween those hummocks, wondering in a vague way 
how they came to be there. Laughing gayly at his 
own clumsiness, he now tugged his foot loose from 
the cleft and then peered down to see what might be 
in the hole, for nothing is insignificant to the woods- 
man. Down in the rubble of needles was — water! 
Quite a little pool of it. Evidently all the interstices 
between the hummocks were filled with it. 

Sid watched the glistening surface for some time, 
for all the day was his, and he had no appointment 
with anything or anybody. Gradually a loose needle 
detached itself from the ring of them about the hole 
and floated slowly toward the brook ! Sid’s interest 
73 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


at once arose mightily. He had assumed that this 
water was merely a backup from the brook, but 
that needle said, No! More of them detached and 
followed the pioneer across the water hole in the 
cleft. 

Out of such small beginnings do great things 
grow, in the woods ! There was evidently a current 
between the hummocks, flowing toward the brook. 
If so, where did it come from? Sid asked himself. 
A spring, back in the depths of the cove, most likely. 
He explored the little dent in which he had camped, 
carefully. The broken and jagged strata of the walls 
had met here, jammed together by some prehis- 
toric movement of the earth’s crust. It was not 
the real plateau wall. The trees had taken advan- 
tage of the jumble of interlocking slabs, for a giant 
fir had effected a lodgment in the fissure, filled as 
it was with pockets of soil that had accumulated 
there. 

Sid eyed it with thrills of adventure and discov- 
ery running through him like wine. There was no 
spring! The water came from farther back — some- 
where! He raced back and crossed the brook, 
climbing the stratified walls of the canyon as high 
as he could. Squatting on a ledge, he peered up- 
74 


LOST CANYON 


ward to where the walls of the canyon towered into 
the cloudless blue far overhead. His eye followed 
the symmetrical column of the giant fir. The edges 
of the cove met and interlocked behind it, and for 
a considerable distance above its topmost spire. 
Then appeared a narrow cleft, a sort of fat man’s 
misery, extending to the top, and through it showed 
a thin seam of sky blue. The cove was a mere wall 
then, and something lay behind it — a blocked canyon 
perhaps. 

On fire with adventure, Sid eyed it speculatively, 
seeking a way to climb up to that cleft. Every ruin 
in the main canyon was known, and had been ex- 
plored and rifled of its relics by ethnologists and 
tourists. Two or three centuries ago they had been 
inhabited by tribes of pueblo Indians, but when the 
Navaho, the Dene (deer hunters), as they called 
themselves, came down from the Far North they 
had attacked these villages and driven out all the 
pueblos in their neighborhood. How the Navaho 
got down, from the neighborhood of Great Slave 
Lake where their kinsmen, the Dehe, still live, — 
through the Blackfeet, the Shoshones, the Cheyennes 
and the Utes, — was a whole mystery in itself, but 
here they were, and had been since the times of the 
75 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Spaniard. It accounted for the deserted state of all 
the cliff dwellings in the San Juan and Chaco Valley 
and Canyon Cheyo regions. 

Suppose, then, there should be a box canyon in 
back of that cleft that no white man had ever yet 
explored ! thought Sid, as he searched the ledgy walls 
of the cove before him. “Lost Canyon ! — and I dis- 
covered it! What a start in ethnology for me! — 
Gee-roo!” he crowed to himself happily, “there’s 
water coming from in behind there, some - 
where!” 

He climbed down and cached his saddle and rifle, 
on general principles. Pinto would not likely be 
molested, for the Black Panther would not hunt in 
the daytime. The pony would be perfectly content 
with the grass and water, which he had not ceased to 
sample since getting over his scare of the night be- 
fore. Picketing him out with the full length of 
lariat, Sid swarmed up the fir, for he had noted 
where a ledge could be reached by climbing out on 
one of its higher branches. Once on the ledge he 
looked down, and some idea of his undertaking be- 
gan to dawn on him. It was a fearsome climb, up 
above ! He was already seventy feet above the floor 
of the canyon and the beginning of the cleft was still 
76 


LOST CANYON 


at least a hundred feet above him. Luckily no slip- 
pery moss grew on the ledges up here ! 

It became more and more awful as he ascended 
from ledge to ledge. There were some that jutted 
out so that he climbed over them like a house eave, 
with his body hanging out in space and a frightful 
fall yawning below him if he failed to make it. And, 
all the time, the sense of vertical rise grew more 
and more uncomfortable. If only you could get 
some slope inward, — something less like a stone lad- 
der of huge slabs ! 

After a time he grew used to the sense of height. 
The thing resolved itself into the immediate prob- 
lem of getting over the next ledge above. They all 
shelved back — just a little — that was some comfort! 
But above him they came out again, in an enormous 
pediment, one of Nature’s own cornices, big as a 
whole Parthenon. Sid looked up, despairingly. If 
the cleft did not begin before that thing started out 
from the cliff wall, he was beaten! And he had no 
idea how he was ever coming down those ledges 
again, either! 

But his route, planned out from below, turned 
out to be feasible. The narrow cleft started from 
the flat floor of a ledge twenty feet above him. He 
77 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


made it, with the help of some young spruces grow- 
ing out of crevices in the rock. He had learned to 
depend on these, as they were firmly anchored by 
their twinelike roots. Sid at last stood on the ledge, 
looked down into the void below with a sigh of relief, 
and then looked up through the cleft with renewed 
hope. 

“Fat Man’s Misery,” as he named the cleft, began 
with a steep slope of loose, dry earth. You could 
climb it with your elbows jammed into the rock on 
either side. Squirming and twisting, Sid wormed 
up through it, hanging on most of the time by the 
rocks, where a slip would have dropped him down 
like an avalanche, to land on Pinto’s pied back far 
below. Then the opposite downward slope began, 
just as steep. That ledged cliff was a mere wall — 
and he had climbed through it! 

When he got down out of the cleft he found him- 
self looking into a small valley choked full of tall 
spruces. Their tops rose out of the green below 
him. It was a small box canyon, sure enough, not 
over a mile to the head of it. Sid started down, his 
feet slipping and sliding in loose shale rock that re- 
fused to halt anywhere. Grabbing a sapling, he 
hung fast and listened to the shower of small stones 
78 


LOST CANYON 


dropping down into the valley over some ledge be- 
low him. 

No way down there! He grimaced to himself, 
shrugging his shoulders. All right ! — down the 
flanks of the canyon, then! He started off, sloping 
down wherever possible, and little by little worked 
below. A last plunge through firs and thick needles, 
and he stood on the floor of the valley. It was filled 
with mossy bowlders, just like those under his camp, 
and down in between them were cool, clear wells of 
running water. 

Sid drank, and then started up the valley, search- 
ing the cliff walls for some of the swallow-nest 
houses of the cliff dwellers. Then, in a widening of 
the valley floor, something attracted him. Thick- 
grown with weeds were clumps of bladed grasses 
that looked somehow familiar. 

“Indian corn! — Wild maize, — I do believe!” he 
exclaimed, examining one of the stalks curiously. 
A small ear with a black tassel on it arrested his hand 
as it slipped up a stalk. Ripping open the husk, a 
tiny knot of blue and white kernels came to view. 
There were not over thirty of them all told. 

“Corn!” cried Sid. “Relapsed back to Nature! 
This is what it looks like in its wild state — and this 
79 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


little flat must have been an Indian planting ground !” 

A wild vine that ran thickly through the growth 
like a ground nut next confirmed it. It was a true 
bean, gone wild, all right ! It did not need the stringy 
pod, filled with small red beans, to reassure him. 
And rambling profusely over the rocks in the sun- 
light was a large-leaved plant that he knew to be 
squash or gourd, he was not sure which. Looking 
further he discovered a rocky and ruined trail lead- 
ing upward from the vegetable patch. Overgrown 
with briers and weeds, still it had that look of going 
somewhere that marks the human trail no matter 
how old. Sid ran out into the valley and peered 
upward, but could see nothing but ledges above, half 
hidden behind thick evergreens that were sprouting 
out of every crack and crevice in the walls. He 
climbed up the trail, often leaping to a spruce trunk 
and back again to avoid places where the rock was 
weathered and shelving. High up on the clifif he 
came at last to a great out- jutting wall of rock that 
stood out like a bare chimney from the clifif face. 
Rude stone steps led up through it, and over the cleft 
hung balanced a great bowlder, held up on its inner 
side by a stout, bare tree trunk. All the former clifif 
dwellers had to do was to knock away that trunk to 
80 


LOST CANYON 


let the rock fall and seal up the entrance to their 
village forever. 

Sid labored up the steps under it gingerly. Some- 
thing great was coming off ! He was surely discov- 
ering a new ruin ! 

If so, it must have been abandoned within the 
memory of men now living, reasoned Sid, for a 
weatherworn pole ladder next came to view, leading 
up to the top of the first pueblo. As the boy 
mounted it, he examined the rock walls closely. 
They were not of 'dobe clay, but of stone, closely 
fitted, without mortar in the joints. This placed it 
as having been built by some one of the San Juan 
tribes, for they invariably used the flat stratified rock 
of the region to make their fine walls. Arrived at 
the top of the ladder, Sid looked about him with 
wonder. Overhead hung the immense smooth roof 
of a cave scoured by water action long ago. In it 
was a small pueblo, only four rooms, but they were 
cunningly built back from the edge of the ledge, so 
that it could not be seen from below nor, indeed, 
from anywhere but the opposite wall of the canyon. 
And it was a little gem, in a fine state of preserva- 
tion, for the characteristic blue and red porous pot- 
tery water jars still stood cemented on the corners 
81 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


of its roofs. The pueblo had manifestly never been 
attacked by hostile Navahos. 

“Gorry, what a find !” ejaculated Sid to himself as 
he walked over the roof of the nearest trap door, out 
of which stuck the poles of a ladder. He looked 
down it, letting his eyes become adjusted to the semi- 
darkness within. A faint, musty odor pervaded the 
place; somehow the very air seemed full of whis- 
pering ghosts, for the wind scoured through the vast 
cave and moaned in the empty windows of the 
houses. Gradually objects developed out of the 
gloom. Two large, gayly decorated granary baskets, 
filled with musty corn, sagged in the comers. Then 
he made out pottery jars, covered with black and 
white symbolical Indian designs. Festoons of dusty 
red and blue corn ears hung from the rafters, and 
rows of what looked like shriveled and dried red 
peppers. Over in one corner Sid finally made out 
the pottery oven, its sooty door still filled with the 
fragments of charcoal and sticks. 

Then he drew back, with a quick start of surprise, 
for, huddled against the walls of the furnace he saw 
two figures, with ornamentally woven blankets fallen 
shapelessly around them. Sid whistled to himself, 
softly, as he glanced around with a shiver of super- 
82 


LOST CANYON 


stitious fear. Then he got a new grip on his cour- 
age and looked down again. Yes, they were there; 
— two human figures squatting in the gloom, hug- 
ging the heat of their pottery fire that had long since 
gone out. Sid looked, and then slowly descended. 
They were an old man and his squaw, shriveled and 
dry as mummies, their clothing tattered and fallen 
into decay. 

Their whole story was here ; pathetic, gripping the 
heart with its human appeal. Sid added a new item 
to his philosophy, — the sacredness of the word 
HOME. These old people had stuck to their home 
until the last, huddling up to their life-giving fire 
with the ultimate feebleness of old age. Their young 
folk had doubtless migrated to one of the populous 
pueblos now flourishing ; these two had stayed by the 
homes their fathers had built, the squaw tending 
her few vegetables, the old buck killing rabbits or 
an occasional deer, the pair making pottery and blan- 
kets as their forefathers had done since time imme- 
morial — the last, last survivors of a communal home, 
where once a happy people had lived and loved ! 

And the flower of their lives was here, the im- 
perishable immortality of art; for these jars and 
baskets were beautiful, as beautiful in form and 
83 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


decoration as any Greek or Etruscan vase. The 
story of their gods was there, just as on the Greek 
vases of two thousand years ago. One or both of 
these old folk had produced these, and left Beauty as 
their memorial. 

Sid stood looking at them, reverently, and then 
stooped to examine the oven door, for the dull white 
of pottery decoration within had caught his eye. 
Raking out the sticks and charcoal, a great vase 
standing bottom upright within the oven came to 
view. Carefully he lifted it out and stood looking 
at it in wonder. It was tall and beautifully formed, 
with a swelling base and wide columnar neck that 
flared like a trumpet flower at the top. It was cov- 
ered with black and white symbolic decorations, — 
rainbows, rain, clouds, lightnings, mountains, mesas, 
all in conventional figures that thrilled him with their 
mystic significance. 

Now, why should these two have spent the last 
hours of life left to them in producing — this? rumi- 
nated Sid. Why, but the love of art, the worship of 
beauty that would not die within them so long as a 
spark of life remained! It was their monument, 
that immortal flowering of art, — the desire to make 
something beautiful that is bedded in the soul of 
84 


LOST CANYON 


man, is in truth the wine of life to those who have 
it, rich and fertile, in their beings. 

Sid at length climbed up the ladder, thoughtfully, 
and went along the roofs of the three other pueblos. 
They were deserted and empty, but outside in the 
sun against the Old People’s room was the empty 
wooden frame of their blanket loom. 

“Thus we lived, and thus we died ; mark and learn 
who will!” sighed the boy, philosophically, clapping 
his hands together abstractedly. “And now, — how 
am I going to get back to Pinto and the Canyon?” 
he asked himself briskly. The climb back down 
those frightful ledges to the fir tree was only to be 
considered as a last resort. As he had passed no 
way out of the box canyon in getting to the pueblo, 
Sid reasoned that the entrance the former dwellers 
used must be somewhere up near its head, where 
there would be a slope of some sort. He went for- 
ward along the roofs of the four houses, hoping to 
find a trail that would lead to this route. 

As he approached the last end wall, a faint but 
noisome odor smote his nostrils. The boy hesitated 
and laid hand on his small .32-20 belt pistol, for this 
smell was of tainted meat, and it warned him that 
an animal lair of some kind was near him. Cau- 
8s 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


tiously he advanced and peered over the wall. Be- 
low him the ledge ended abruptly — the cliff men had 
built right to the end of it, so as to make it inacces- 
sible from below at that end. Spruces grew out of 
the cliff wall and concealed it, but through their roots 
Sid thought he could detect worn spots where some 
creature had been in the habit of passing. 

Then he turned his attention to the back of the 
high cave roof overhead whence came the odor. It 
shelved down behind the pueblo, and as he walked 
over to the inner walls, Sid could make out a black 
and dusty area in behind them, where the cave came 
down to the ledge floor. Here the shelf slabs were 
not three feet above the ledge floor, a slit of dense 
gloom, where water had once scoured out a soft 
stratum of rock. His eye gradually made out bones 
strewed on the soil under here, ribs, skulls, leg bones, 
all of sheep or deer; he could not say which. 

“Phew !” he muttered, drawing back to the fresh 
air. “It’s either a cougar or a bear den — it can’t 
be the latter, unless it’s some small black bear, for 
nothing but a fly could come through those spruces 
on the cliff. It is a cat! Cougar — perhaps the 
Black Panther himself! — Why not?” he declared, 
with growing conviction. ‘Til just bet it was him, 
86 


LOST CANYON 


last night! He hunts around here, or did, until he 
found that stealing the Indians’ sheep was free, to 
him! Gosh, the beggar might be paying rent and 
taxes!” sniffed Sid. “Of all the nerve! He’s got 
a pretty soft thing — I’ll say ! — until some one of us 
gets a shot at him, out here. And that’ll be me, I 
hope.” 

But then he remembered that he had not his rifle 
with him. Nothing but the little inadequate .32-20. 
The quicker he got back and came up here with that 
rifle, the better, for the Black Panther would be quite 
likely to revisit his lair, perhaps this very day. 

Sid climbed down by the pueblo trail he had first 
discovered and worked up through the spruces up 
the valley, confident that he would soon find a way 
out and speculating on how to get down from the 
plateau above into the chasm where his camp was. 
But the rim walls of the box canyon offered him lit- 
tle encouragement. Three hundred feet above him 
they towered, with bare, stratified and perpendicu- 
lar walls after the lower slopes of talus ended. The 
large spruces in the valley contented themselves with 
a root hold in the wet soil in its ravine. Nowhere 
did they come near enough to the cliffs to be of any 
use in climbing out. 


87 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Sid pushed through them, looking for the place 
where the cliff dwellers had come into and left the 
canyon, for, of course, a community of people could 
not have lived shut up in here. But, when he burst 
through the tree growth at the canyon head, already 
the high walls of a cliff, partly seen through the 
trees ahead, had given him a warning of his fate. 
This canyon had no head slope! Instead, a giant 
wall of granite stretched before his troubled gaze, 
and in the center of it was the smooth, scoured trace 
of an ancient waterfall. A terrific granite slope 
filled up one corner, between it and the side walls, 
and there were cracks in it and what looked like the 
shallow cuttings of stone steps, but the lowest edge 
of this was utterly inaccessible from below. The 
cliff dwellers probably reached it by systems of long, 
notched tree trunks, which the vicissitudes of ice, 
snow, rain and weather had long since rotted and 
crumbled to dust. 

For him there was no way out — save by the cleft, 
the ledges, and the fir tree up which he had come! 
Sid stood there, staring blankly, sickened by the 
thought of that awful climb down. He knew well 
that it was impossible. 


CHAPTER V 

THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 

R ED JAKE and Scotty rode slowly to the left 
under the brow of the red butte, after Sid 
and Big John had started up the ravine for 
their deer. Scotty drew his .405 out of its saddle 
scabbard and rested it across his pommel as they 
approached a belt of scrub oak timber. 

Red Jake eyed it quizzically. “I ain’t aimin’, no 
ways, to be introosive,” he drawled, “an’ I’ve kep’ 
my health by remainin’ strictly out of other folks’ 
business — but thar’s limits!” he grinned. “Which 
I’m burnin’ to find out, is thet thar cannon for 
shootin’ deer or elephants?” 

Scotty flushed. “It’s all the gun I have,” he re- 
plied quietly. “She’s a bit heavy for deer, perhaps, 
but she was father’s old meat gun out in Montana. 
He left it to me. ... A Hun shell killed him, in the 
89 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Argonne,” added Scotty, his voice dropping over 
the remembrance. 

“Shore, I’m sorry, kid !” came back Jake, extend- 
ing a lean brown hand, all contrition. “We Ari- 
zonans has a pecooliar brand of humor with tender- 
feet — but we means well ! Put her thar, Pal.” 

He gripped Scotty’s hand warmly, and the begin- 
ning of a friendship established itself between them. 

“Now you put them spurs to that rampin’ steed of 
yours, kid, an’ we’ll ride up this gulch. She’s ace- 
full on wil’ turks, an’ ye’ll hev a chance to run one 
up an’ do some fancy shootin’.” 

His own mount began to run as he spoke. Scot- 
ty’s pony snorted, threw back his head and started 
into a gallop. The low branches whipped across his 
face; there was the constant swish and slap of fly- 
ing leaves, a constant warding off of branch after 
branch as the horses thundered through the draw. 
It was grown thick with scrub oaks and scraggly 
pines and junipers, with here and there a locust- 
leaved mesquite, its pods strewing the soil. Then 
ahead came a roar and the flap of big wings as some 
large bird rose out of the thicket. 

“Thar goes one — watch sharp, now !” yelled Jake, 
hauling up his horse on its haunches. Scotty jerked 
90 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


on his curb and dropped the reins as he raised the 
.405, peering eagerly under the low trees. Rapid 
footfalls sounded in the leaves all about them and 
the Pee! Pee! of wild turkey chicks slipping through 
the underbrush. Their hurtling charge had scared 
the flock out of their natural silent caution. Sud- 
denly a long bronze bird, running like the wind, his 
red legs and shining feathers flashing in the sun, 
darted across an opening. Scotty drew the bead on 
him, swung well ahead and pressed trigger. The 
bellow of his heavy weapon split the air under the 
trees, and out of the smoke they saw the gobbler 
struggling on the sand, his huge wings fluttering 
wildly. 

“Some shooting son ! — seventy paces or I’m a hoss 
thief !” roared Jake. “Thar goes another! — Atter 
him! — Ride like a buster!” The ponies leaped into 
gallop as a large bird twisted and dodged through 
the underbrush, for all the world like a scared hen. 
They wheeled and spun about, following his erratic 
dives, now and then catching sight of him. 

“Tricky as a Mex. gambler’s deck, kid!” gasped 
Red Jake, picking his horse up like a cat to wheel 
him halfway around. “Thar he goes! Ride him 
up ! — Hi! Hi! Hi!” 


91 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Their combined onset was too much for that par- 
ticular turk, who took to wing forthwith. Scotty 
raised his rifle but hesitated. The bird was big as a 
barrel, but still mighty easy to miss on the wing, with 
a rifle! Red Jake spurred after him at top speed, 
whipped out his revolver and fanned shot after shot 
up into the air at him. At the third report the turkey 
collapsed and came down into the brush with a sound- 
ing thump. 

“That’s Arizona shootin’ for ye, son!” grinned 
Jake, reining up his pony to punch out empty shells 
with the rammer of his frontier Colt. “Down in 
this free an’ enlightened commoonity we learns to 
cut our teeth on a six-gun, son. For A B C’s we has 
the short an’ easy road to the right hip ; and when we 
gits so’s we kin hit ’em in the air from a gallopin’ 
cayuse we’s outer high school,” he grinned, stopping 
to roll a cigarette with thumb and forefinger and 
lighting it deftly by snapping the match on his fin- 
ger nail. 

They rode over to where the turkey had fallen, 
and Jake swung him up on the saddle. He would 
go all of eleven pounds. Except for his red legs 
and the absence of a broad white band across his 
tail feathers, there was nothing to distinguish him 
92 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


from the domesticated turkey of the farm. They 
tied this one and Scotty’s together and hung them 
in a tree, and then rode out up the draw for further 
adventures. The gully rose and widened out into a 
swale, filled with thick brown bear grass; beyond it 
began the sage and greasewood bushes, as moisture 
became scantier in the soil. To the right reared the 
immense escarpments of the red buttes; ahead a 
long, level sky line proclaimed some sort of di- 
vide. 

“Waal, son, if you’re ready to jingle a spur, it’s 
jest likely we may see a couple of prong-horns over 
that divide. They lays out back here in the desert, 
for thar’s no drivin’ ’em away from water. I sup- 
pose you’d like to git one, hey?” inquired Jake. 

“I’d love to see an antelope, but to shoot one — 
not on a bet!” returned Scotty, shaking his head 
stoutly. 

A look of pleased surprise crossed Red Jake’s 
face. “Waal now!” he grinned, all interest. “Ef 
you ain’t the first sport that’s come down here that 
wasn’t all-fired crazy to snake out one of our ante- 
lopes! Th’ Major, he don’t shoot none, because 
they’se mighty scarce — but a guest, — of course, he 
don’t say nothin’, but ” Jake’s pantomime was 


93 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


expressive. “Say, them sports’ll put in all their 
chips the first round to git a prong-horn !” 

“Just let me see one, wild, that’s all,” said Scotty, 
feeling that his stock was rising in the Arizonan’s 
estimation. “None of us may ever look upon an- 
other, soon, you know.” 

They spurred up and rode out into the desert back 
of the red buttes. It was hot and bare and dotted 
with sage. It shimmered with heat waves, and 
glared like iron slag under the pitiless sun. The 
desert was in a far different mood, now, than when 
the glories of sunset and dawn made it splendid; 
it was now a scene of endless desolation, with sun- 
baked gray mesas standing sentinel across it, 
stretched to the north. 

“Look! Thar they go! See ’em!” cried Jake, 
pointing suddenly across the distant plains with his 
finger. Scotty puckered up his eyes and searched 
the shimmering heat as best he could. Something 
was moving, far to the north. Like twin gray ghosts 
were they, bounding with incredible speed and tire- 
lessness. Then one stopped and looked back toward 
them. A white flash appeared from his rump. Im- 
mediately he melted into the same gray invisibility 
as before. 


94 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


“That’s their signal, that rump flash!” exclaimed 
Jake. “The ha’rs move, jest like you’d turn plush. 
They signals a warning, that way, to try out any- 
thing so far off they cayn’t see it well. If we could 
make a white flash like that in answer they’d think 
we was another herd. Look your fill, sonny, this is 
about as near as we’ll git to them.” 

The antelope disappeared behind a ledge of rocks, 
as Scotty sat silently, resting one leg over his pony’s 
saddle, scanning the torrid, iron-bound scene. 

“We’ll git back to the ranch, now, son,” remarked 
Jake as they rode back to the turkeys. “Hyar’s meat 
enough, even if Montana John an’ th’ other kid don’t 
hang up no buck. Put away your hardware. We 
won’t see nothin’ on the way back.” 

They rode down the draw, and then along the 
river bank, crossing to the ranch. Major Hinchman 
and the Colonel rose to greet them and exclaim de- 
lightedly over the turkeys, while a roared order 
from Hinchman brought the Chinese cook running 
out into the patio. 

“You, Lum Looke! — catch’m turkey, roast top- 
side all over, savvy?” directed the Major, handing 
the birds to the grinning Celestial. 

95 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


About an hour later Big John rode into the patio 
with the buck across his saddle. 

“Where’s Sid, John — coming along?” inquired 
Colonel Colvin, surprisedly, as Big John dismounted 
and pulled at the saddle thongs that held his buck in 
place. 

“Nope !” he grinned. “Sid’s gone locoed, Colonel. 
Got a lonesome fit. Shore, nawthin’d do but he must 
steal a haunch of my buck an’ take a bag of pinole 
that he’s got hitched to his belt, and off he goes for 
a couple of days, all by his lonesome ! He says fer 
us to pick him up in the Canyon.” 

Red Jake wagged his head approvingly. “Which 
the same is the right layout,” he put in. “I’m ad- 
mirin’ that kid’s sperrit ! Ain’t nawthin’ to hurt him, 
’scusin’ p’rhaps a cinnamon b’ar that’d run away as 
quick as he would, in these parts.” 

“I ain’t worryin’ none, either, Jake,” grinned Big 
John. “It’s been for a long time my the’ry that thet 
boy’s borned to be hung, — an’ the good Lord ain’t 
goin’ to let nothin’ happen to him to cheat the halter, 
you bet !” 

“But how will we find him?” asked the Colonel 
uneasily. “If it’s the Canyon, we’ve got a mighty 
lot of room to pick him up in. At Monument Can- 
96 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


yon, you say, John ? Well, I’m going out to-morrow. 
I can’t feel as easy as you do about him, John. 
Major Hinchman can’t get away for the trip, I’m 
sorry to say, so it’ll be just you and Scotty and my- 
self, — and Sid when we find him. Get together all 
the horses and dog gear you need, and this afternoon 
we’ll go over the grub.” 

It was early next morning when their little caval- 
cade, preceded by the four dogs, trotted out from 
the hospitable gates of Hinchman’s ranch and fol- 
lowed the left bank of the river. Colonel Colvin 
led the line on his big roan, with the bulging pockets 
of his cavalry saddle secured by their leather yoke 
over the cantle hook, and above that hung his bed 
roll and tarp in a long, low bundle. After him came 
four pack animals, with the water cans in their pan- 
niers, now filled with oats, to be used later on the 
desert, crossing to Grand Canyon. The grub and 
duffel bags were piled across the saddle trees under 
tarps, with the diamond hitch thrown over them. 
Big John brought up the rear, with Scotty as out- 
rider. The way led up some of the roughest bad 
lands Scotty had ever seen until it reached the rim 
of a high plateau to the east. The horses labored 
and grunted; even the dogs stopped now and then 
97 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


with panting tongues, and once or twice the pack 
animals tried to roll over in protest. But once on 
the plateau they found themselves in a typical open 
stand of western yellow pine, the tall, well-formed 
trees standing far apart from each other, gigantic 
and imposing spires of dark green. The floor of the 
plateau was flat and covered with sparse bayeta 
grass. 

Presently the horses broke into a run of their own 
accord, even the pack animals bobbing along in an 
enthusiastic burst of speed. Far under the distant 
tree trunks Ruler and his three pups galloped tire- 
lessly, noses down, snuffing old scents, heels flying, 
ears flapping, the pups now and then giving tongue 
as they struck recent jack rabbit or deer sign. 

Scotty and Colonel Colvin galloped hard after 
them, heading off the pups from all trails with slash- 
ing quirt and bellowed command, for it was essen- 
tial to get them rabbit and deer proof before going 
over to the lion country of the Grand Canyon. Mile 
after mile of this exhilarating open forest riding 
kept up. Twice during the morning deeper and 
thicker banks of trees showed up ahead, where small 
canyons intervened, with dense growths of spruce 
98 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


rising out of them. Or, there would be a hazy void 
ahead and they would find themselves on the brink 
of a vast chasm, where some tributary to Red Val- 
ley would cut its gigantic ravine through the belted 
forest of the plateau. Then Big John would lead 
the train in detours of miles to the eastward around 
the head of it. This way was much longer and more 
circuitous than Sid’s route down Red Valley, but it 
served the double purpose of striking Canyon Cheyo 
far up near its head and reaching at the same time 
Neyani’s hogan, which lay to the eastward of it, 
for Colonel Colvin had agreed to look up Neyani 
and see what could be done about the Medicine Pan- 
ther for Major Hinchman. 

It was four in the afternoon when Big John at 
length turned west and the pack train began to de- 
scend the head slope of a ravine which led down in 
steep declivities into the Canyon Cheyo floor hun- 
dreds of feet below. 

“We ought to name this ravine ‘Yellow Canyon,’ 
all right, sir !” said Scotty to the Colonel as they dis- 
mounted and led their horses down the almost per- 
pendicular slopes. “Look at those buttes — all of yel- 
low clay, and worn as smooth as cakes of soap ! See 
how the trees manage to grow, out of every crack 
99 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


and cranny and all their trunks turn up the cliff 
faces !” 

“It’ll get down to solid rock soon enough!” re- 
plied the Colonel, quietly. “Clay, sandstone, lime- 
stone, tertiary, jurassic, triassic — a man can’t help 
but become something of a geologist, in this coun- 
try!” he laughed. “You can read a big story of the 
earth in the walls of these canyons. But wait till 
you see the Grand Canyon, though ! There you’ll see 
strata enough to write the whole vast epic of the 
world’s creation! . . . Mark! — Up on the cliffs!” 

He pointed upward to where a huge brown bird 
was just launching into flight from a dead juniper 
growing down on the face of the yellow cliffs. 

“Golden eagle!” cried Scotty. “That’s my first! 
Wonder what in the nation he’s doing, in this game- 
less land !” 

“It’s not gameless, for him — and, besides, there’s 
young lamb! The Navaho flocks are not far from 
here. They are within easy flight, for that old ma- 
rauder!” retorted Colonel Colvin. 

They had now reached the dry, rocky bed of the 
ravine. It sloped downward in a vast series of 
ledges, as different strata of rock were cut through. 
By mid-afternoon they were in the main canyon it- 


ioo 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


self, and searching eagerly its sheer walls for ruins, 
calling and yodeling, hoping to come upon Sid in one 
of them. Up under the cliffs at the tops of steep 
slopes were these prehistoric pueblos, some of them 
to be reached by easy climbing, others perched on 
steep, smooth walls that could only have been scaled 
by a system of pole ladders. 

“I think we’d better begin shooting signals for 
Sid, now, boys,” remarked the Colonel with a tinge 
of anxiety in his voice. “I’ve had my eye open for 
signs of him for some time, now, but so far we 
haven’t found a trace. Scotty, suppose you try the 
.405? It’s the most powerful rifle we have.” 

Scotty raised the heavy weapon and fired their 
old private signal. Bang! Bang! Bang! — Bang! it 
roared out, and the valley of cliffs reechoed it sol- 
emnly down the length of the canyon. They all lis- 
tened with pent breaths, but no answering shot 
came. 

“Wall, I’ll be derned!” ejaculated Big John. “A 
man’ll hear that big rifle five mile, in this yere can- 
yon! An’ Sid’s .30’s got a right smart whip to it, 
too, fer answerin’. Shore is funny as a nigger’s 
mewl !” 

“And it’s mighty queer Ruler and the pups haven’t 
101 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


picked up any scent of him, too. Who’s got some- 
thing of Sid’s on him?” asked the Colonel anxiously. 

Something that was Sid’s ! It was with a sense of 
foreboding that Scotty searched his pockets, in vain, 
for some trinket, however slight, of his old chum’s, 
that might serve the hound’s nose. 

“Shore, fellers, we’s way off the trail in this- 
yere !” spoke up Big John, suddenly. “Ef Sid’s come 
through here, he’d be ridin’ the pinto. What we 
wants is somethin’ off thet hoss ! — I’ve got the idee !” 
he exclaimed, his eyes brightening. “He rode off an’ 
forgot his hobbles, — like a kid will, allers forgettin’ 
somethin’. I’ve got ’em in the horse gear pack, right 
now.” 

He loosened the diamond hitch on one of the pack 
ponies, while the others were rounding up Ruler and 
the pups. Presently he yanked a pair of leather 
hobbles out from under the tarp. 

“Here, Ruler, — you ol’ pisen critter, — smell ’em !” 
he commanded, shoving the hobbles into Ruler’s 
eager nose. “They’re sure whiffy of hoss-flesh ! Go 
fetch, Ruler! Fetch! Ssssuey, dawg!” 

Ruler rose on his hind legs and pawed the air with 
an understanding bellow. It did not take much 
further encouragement to get him to circling about, 


102 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


snuffing along the canyon trail with busy nose. The 
party sat watching him on horseback, half skeptical 
over the experiment, the Colonel inclined to ride 
down the Canyon to the west, first, for that was the 
direction from which Sid would have to come. But 
Ruler was famed for his sagacity. Many a story 
had drifted back from Arkansas of the incredible 
feats he had performed, — such as finding lost chil- 
dren in the mountains, and once of having gone 
back three miles into the forest to retrieve an axe 
forgotten in the woods. 

A bellow from him decided it Ruler braced back 
on his haunches, pointed his great black muzzle to 
the skies, and let out a rolling barking-treed call 
that was his signal of having found a trail. Then 
he set off hotfoot to the east, his three pups yipping 
after him excitedly. The men spurred their ponies 
to a gallop, for Ruler took a hot pace to keep up 
with him. 

He talked excitedly in hound language as he loped 
along. “It’s all right ! — Here's more ! — I've got him 
coming fine !” his reassuring tones seemed to say, as 
he ate up the narrow horse trail ahead of him. The 
walls of the canyon seemed to fly by as the ponies 
strung out in pursuit. There was no time to so 
103 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


much as glance up at ruins, now. They had lost in- 
terest in ruins, somehow ! Here was Sid’s trail, lead- 
ing out of the canyon; though why or when he had 
gone they could not conjecture. 

Gradually the trail sloped upward, and the sur- 
rounding walls became less high and further apart. 
At the top of the last gulch a vast sterile plain spread 
before them. Low junipers and mesquite dotted it, 
— semidesert again! Big John turned in his saddle 
to shout back at them. 

“Watch out for Navaho hogans, fellers!” he 
yelled. “There’s quite a lot of them settled here- 
abouts.” 

Scotty looked around from his jouncing pony, but 
could spy out absolutely nothing. He knew that 
the hogans, or Navaho houses, appeared from the 
outside as mere dirt mounds, and were usually built 
near mesas or rocky ridges where it would take a 
sharp eye to pick them out. They were never built 
near water, the Navahos preferring to carry it from 
some distant source. It was all a part of their 
stealthy raiding and marauding tendencies; a war- 
like folk that had invaded the pueblo country several 
centuries ago, — whose very villages were a sort of 
ambush for the unwary. 


104 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


But Ruler still kept on, streaking across the desert 
in an unhesitating run. His occasional bay showed 
that the pony’s trail was quite recent, enough so that 
the heat of the desert day had not evaporated all 
scent from it. Then far to the east showed up a 
broken ridge of rock with quite a thicket around it, 
rising like a green hummock out of the ocean of gray 
sage. In the midst of it Scotty’s young eyes made 
out a tiny patch of color. 

“Mark !” he called. “Indians ! Navaho ! — See it, 
sir?” he asked, turning to point out the patch to the 
Colonel. “Looks like a blanket or something, over 
yonder in that grove of mesquite.” 

Ruler redoubled his bays, and the gray sand 
spurted from his heels. He headed straight for the 
grove. A tiny wisp of smoke rose from one side of 
it, curling lazily away in the desert breeze. The 
patch of color had now developed into a square 
shape, striped and crisscrossed with a pattern of 
some sort, and under the shade of a mesquite the 
forked uprights and cross poles of the blanket loom 
gradually developed and became distinct to the eye. 

Then, with the suddenness of realization, they all 
became aware of the dirt mound of the hogan, loom- 
ing up before them. A gray blanket hanging in its 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


door had been pushed aside, and a young Indian 
girl had stepped out with a spindle of wool yarn in 
one hand and a pottery jar in the other. The black 
square that she opened up immediately gave the 
hogan shape around it. It was large and conical in 
shape, and cunningly planted with aloes, yucca and 
even sage, so that it looked about the same as the 
desert soil around it. 

The girl peered at them, and then ran around to 
one side, where the smoke came from under the 
shade of a juniper. A young buck appeared, the red 
bandanna around his forehead the most conspicuous 
thing about him at that distance. Big John shouted 
to the dogs and reined up his pony, for a hound on 
a hot scent is quite likely to attack any human that 
gets in his way. Ruler turned and circled back in- 
quiringly, for he was well trained to voice, while a 
pistol shot across the sand halted the pups, and they 
came around to follow in his lead. Scotty and the 
Colonel closed up, and the party of whites halted, 
while Big John dismounted and slipped a leash on 
Ruler. 

The young buck came running out to greet them 
with a smile of welcome on his bronzed face. “How, 
white Father Hinch, ,, he called out, evidently tak- 
106 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


in g the Colonel for Hinchman. He slowed up and 
walked diffidently toward them, his white cotton 
shirt, open at the neck, decorated with silver jewelry 
and his blue cloth leggins gaudy with beadwork. 

“How, Injun, — where white boy?” demanded Big 
John, sternly. 

The youth looked mystified, and then his mobile 
face took on a lugubrious expression as he broke out 
into lamentations in unintelligible Navaho. Then, in 
broken English, reversing his sentences in direct 
translation from the Navaho — “Oh, White Father — 
the Dene much, much trouble have!” he cried, ad- 
dressing the Colonel. “The Black Panther of Dsilyi, 
he come ! Many sheep, he kill ! My father that me 
have done big wrong, he say.” He almost wept, 
seizing Colonel Colvin’s hand and begging him with 
pleading eyes to dismount and come at once to their 
hogan. 

“This must be that son of old Neyani’s that we 
heard about at Hinchman’s, boys,” said the Colonel. 
“We’ll have to get this trouble of the black panther 
off his chest before we can get anything more out 
of him concerning Sid. Funny he doesn’t say any- 
thing of his being here, though !” 

“There, boy, — me come from Father Hinchman — 
107 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


me make all right !” he soothed, smiling at the young 
Navaho. “You Neyani’s son? ,, 

“Neyani’s son I was” said the young Navaho, 
sadly. “That I did wrong he say, and so Dsilyi his 
panther send. Now I no more son of his, he say!” 

The Colonel whistled. 

“There’s superstition for you, Scotty ! Tve heard 
that the Navaho are the most superstitious of all 
Indian tribes. We’ll have to handle this with the 
utmost tact, or there’ll likely be a big row over it. 
This boy is doomed, unless we can manage to inter- 
fere somehow, though. I know Indians ! Somehow 
this freak panther must be explained, and so they 
have to make someone the scapegoat over it ! We’ll 
ride in and see Neyani. Perhaps we can find out 
something from him about Sid. It looks to me, 
though, as if Ruler had followed a Navaho pony 
here, and fooled us.” 

They rode to the hogan, slowly. An old squaw 
was sitting before the partly finished blanket, pull- 
ing alternately at the warp sticks and passing little 
balls of colored yarn through various sheds of its 
warp strings. The young girl had seated herself on 
the sand before the hogan and was dipping wool 
yarns in her dye bowls of red, black and yellow dyes. 

108 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


As they approached she looked at them shyly and 
then picked up a hank of dry wool and caught the 
end around the staple on her spindle. Rolling it 
across her thigh, she drew out the lengths of spun 
yam, allowing it to coil itself loose around the spin- 
dle as each length was twisted to the proper thick- 
ness. 

“Where Neyani, son?” asked the Colonel after 
bowing to the squaw and the maiden, who returned 
his salutations with frightened smiles. 

The Navaho youth waved his hand toward a cor- 
ner of a pole sheep corral which jutted out of the 
brush back of the hogan. Evidently he was not wel- 
come in his father’s presence, for he immediately 
dropped back and went over to where his silver forge 
lay smoking under the shade of the thick desert 
juniper. 

The party dismounted and tied their horses, while 
Big John put leashes on the remaining dogs, for 
there would surely be half-wild shepherd dogs out in 
the corral, and they had no wish to open up the pro- 
ceedings with a dog fight. 

The Colonel led the way around the hogan. Their 
appearance was greeted by a chorus of barks from 
two shaggy shepherd dogs, half coyote, that guarded 
109 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Neyani’s sheep. The old fellow was kneeling over 
a struggling animal under the shade of a low bush, 
putting some sort of healing vegetable compound 
on deep, bloody gashes in its side. 

Seamed and wrinkled with age, with silver locks 
hanging in thick mats over his ears, Neyani’s eyes 
were, nevertheless, bright with the unconquerable 
spirit of a wild and free desert people. Just now 
there was deep trouble in them, and he looked up at 
Colonel Colvin with something like relief, for he 
evidently connected his coming in some way with 
Major Hinchman, the White Father of all the 
Navahos. 

“How, Neyani ! What’s the trouble, bear?” asked 
Colonel Colvin, pointing down at the wounded sheep 
and endeavoring to draw the old fellow out by a 
leading question. 

Neyani shook his head gloomily. “No, cougar. 
Dsilyi send him. Plenty sheep, he kill.” 

The whites knew vaguely of Dsilyi. He was the 
Elder Brother of the Navaho, a heroic demigod who 
had visited in the abodes of the high gods, and who 
stood in the same relation to the Navaho as Achilles 
did to the ancient Greeks. 

“Why don’t you shoot the varmint, Injun?” broke 
no 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


in Big John. “You won’t have no wool for to make 
blankets of if you don’t get rid of that critter.” 

Neyani shrank back, alarmed at the very idea, and 
an expression of superstitious fear crossed his face. 
“Ugh! No, — no! Navaho no kill ! Him medicine 
panther! Him black! Dsilyi send him.” 

“Well, I want to know !” guffawed Big John, in- 
credulously. Neyani shot him a dark look, and then 
turned to the Colonel, whose face showed more sym- 
pathy for the Indian’s beliefs and superstitions. 

“Oh, White Father, — black he is! Great, and 
black as the night ! I, Neyani, seen him have ! Dsilyi 
send him !” he insisted, coming back to his original 
declaration again. 

“How do you know that he is Dsilyi’s panther, 
Neyani?” asked the Colonel, sympathetically, sup- 
pressing patiently his own ardent wish to inquire 
about his son. 

“Know, then, the legend of the Navaho, my White 
Father. How that Dsilyi crossed the rainbow arch 
and so to the Sacred Mountain came. And in the 
mountain was a cave. In the cave was a fire. The 
fire without wood burned. Around the fire were 
four panthers. A white one to the north. A blue 


hi 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


one to the south. A yellow one to the west. A black 
one to the east.” Neyani paused to let the signifi- 
cance of this — to him — sink in. “The four panthers 
asked for tobacco,” he went on. “Then Dsilyi of the 
medicine tobacco took that he had stolen from the 
Ute. He to the four panthers gave. The four pan- 
thers smoked the medicine pipe. Still they lay, 
dead. Then took 'Dsilyi the ashes from the pipe, 
and on the four panthers rubbed. The four panthers 
came alive again. Then drew the four panthers a 
sheet of cloud from the four corners of the cave. 
And on the cloud were painted the yays of the cul- 
tivated plants by which the Dene (Navaho) now 
live. Thus Dsilyi for his Younger Brothers the 
secrets of the plants learned. And now Dsilyi afflicts 
the hogan of Neyani with the Black Panther,” 
grunted Neyani, despondently. “From the Valley 
of the Departed to the west he comes! Great and 
black as the night he is!” shuddered Neyani. He 
relapsed into silence and looked to the Colonel for 
some help in this his trouble. 

“But why has Dsilyi sent him, Neyani ? Has any- 
one in your hogan done any wrong?” asked the 
Colonel, sympathetically. 

Neyani’s face took on a look of stony immobility. 


THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


Whatever his private family griefs were, he chose 
not to air them before strangers. 

“Well, I know why!” suddenly roared Big John. 
“Injun, you projooces that white boy, mighty sud- 
den pronto!” he shouted, angrily. “Or by jings, 
you’ll find more’n forty black panthers atter ye! — 
Look yonder, Colonel !” 

They all followed his pointing finger, to where 
the long poles of a horse corral up on the ridge back 
of the hogan showed. Nickering at them over the 
gate was Sid’s pinto ! Ruler was right ! 


CHAPTER VI 
RULER TAKES A HAND 

W HEN the first realization burst upon Sid 
that he was a prisoner in Lost Canyon, 
his first reaction was a rebellious No! 
The thing was preposterous — there must be a way 
out ! The cougar’s route, for one thing. With that 
idea in mind, Sid decided on a return to his cave lair 
on the pueblo ledge. He had a shivery repugnance 
for the haunted cliff dwelling, now, since he knew 
that he would very likely have to spend the night in 
the same valley with this abode of departed spirits. 
But Sid tossed aside such thoughts, for the present, 
and worked his way resolutely up to the cliff dwell- 
ers’ village again. The cougar’s trail leading out of 
his cave was well marked — as far as the edge of the 
ledge. From there his immense strength and activ- 
114 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


ity, and his sharp, hooked claws made possible for 
him any number of different routes along the cliff 
wall. There were claw marks, here and there, plainly 
to be seen, places that the boy couldn’t think of 
reaching. No creature without hooked claws could 
remain there for a minute! 

Sid marked a number of these spots and worked 
out a more or less nebulous route by them along 
the cliff walls. Going below, he could pick these 
up, he thought, and follow them up the canyon so 
as to locate the spot where the cougar came down the 
cliff. With this idea he descended again and stum- 
bled hurriedly down the rock valley, searching the 
ledges above with his eyes. He could just discern 
the faint spoor marks, where certain small shrubs 
had been bent over, or certain patches of loose, rocky 
soil dislodged. They all trended north, toward the 
head of the canyon. 

And there lay his fate ! That vast, smooth slope, 
of utterly bare rock slanted up from the upper ledges 
to the top, here. It was smooth, of weathered gray 
granite, and it was so steep that no man without a 
rope to hang on to could attempt to climb it. A 
thin fissure, with tufts of weeds growing invitingly 
out of it, crossed it diagonally. A man might as- 
115 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


cend, with that precarious foothold, — but it was 
utterly inaccessible from below. 

The great cat had negotiated it with ease, how- 
ever, his steel-hook claws gripping the granite 
without probably giving it so much as a thought. 
Over it, up and down, he had come, carrying his prey 
in his teeth, as patches of hair and dried blood on 
the granite showed. The route was as easy to him 
as to a cat going up a tree ; to a man it was quite as 
impossible. 

It was growing late when Sid finally came to the 
conclusion that impossible was the answer, so far 
as he was concerned. He spent an hour more in 
walking up and down the ravine, studying the cliff 
rim for some possible crevice or chimney up which 
he could climb by the aid of a manufactured rope. 
This, too, was hopeless, without at least a hundred 
feet of lariat — things were done on too huge a scale, 
here, to be at all complaisant with puny man and 
his inventions! To return to the high cleft in the 
wall that blocked Lost Canyon suggested itself. Sid 
could see nothing in that to allure! At the best he 
could only reach the ledge at the bottom of "Tat 
Man's Misery," there to sit and look below. His 
own people were not due in the Canyon until to- 
il 6 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


morrow; even then it would be a mere chance that 
could decide them to come up this side canyon which 
he had explored. He recollected some talk about 
their striking the canyon from its upper end, — seven 
miles away from him ! With his small .32-20 revol- 
ver there was hardly a chance that they would hear 
him, — even if he sat on the ledge all next day and 
fired signals. 

Sid decided that his present duty was to make 
himself comfortable for the night. Usually this was 
a most delectable occupation. Never in his life had 
Sid known fear of the forest. One thing which had 
always brought a disrespectful grin to his face on 
being urged to read the great poets had been their 
very evident distaste for a forest — at night. Even 
in the daytime they peopled it with fairies, dryads, 
monsters, witches — at the very least with wild beasts 
and all the terrors of the unknown and unseen. Not 
one of them, Sid felt, could have been left out all 
night in the forest without a feeling of uneasiness, 
without at least a stoppage of the Muse and an ard- 
ent desire for a return to the comforts and security 
of civilization ! But to Sid the trees, the rocks, the 
birds, the forest animals all formed one vast brother- 
hood with him ; it was always with a feeling of utter 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


peace and security that he allowed himself to sink 
into the unconsciousness of sleep, confident of a joy- 
ous reawakening when dawn should steal through 
the forest aisles again and all its wild brotherhood 
burst into life and song. 

But this evening, with the grisly proximity of the 
deserted pueblo and its unburied dead, with the cer- 
tainty that his valley was shared by a night-prowling 
wild beast, he found that his usual serenity had left 
him and instead there was a nervousness and a dis- 
inclination for sleep — a tendency, even, to stop in the 
midst of some trivial action and watch and listen. 
And, that evening, Sid discovered also the presence 
of an Elder Brother within him, — that cowardly, 
brutish, superstitious and terror-ridden cave man 
that psychologists tell us occupies the left lobe of 
the brain. This part of ourselves is only held in 
subjection by the superior soul of man, — the result 
of ages of intellectual training and advancement, — 
that controls the right lobe of his brain and domi- 
nates the whole man. But this pre-Adamite self, this 
abject creature, — whose mildest manifestation is 
that peculiar fit of shyness known as “stage fright” 
— lurks always within each one of us, ready to drive 
into blind, unreasoning terror, the mad fury of mur- 
118 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


der, or the brutish outbursts of passion, the best 
of men, once he gains the ascendancy. He whis- 
pered now to Sid, counseling he knew not what mad- 
ness, ghost-terrors, fetishes, superstitious fear of 
the dead. 

For a time Sid held him in check, occupied with 
the practical business of making a bivouac, — a sort 
of bear’s den of spruce browse slanting over a hori- 
zontal pole beside his fire. After that came the 
preparation of a meal of bacon, coffee and pinole. 
But as night fell and it grew pitch black within the 
canyon, the whimpers of the terrified cave man within 
him grew louder and more insistent, urging him to 
fly, he knew not where, — to yell aloud for succor, — 
to build a huge fire for its imaginary protection — 
all the promptings of the arrant coward. Sid fought 
him off, partly amused over the childish suggestions 
that swirled through his brain, partly sympathetic 
over the lives of real terror that the actual cave 
man must have lived, and whose indelible recollec- 
tions they have transmitted down to us, deep buried 
in the very core of our beings. 

But still there were things that helped the cave 
man. A wind was stirring, and it mourned and 
moaned through the empty windows in the deserted 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


pueblo above him, shrieked and gibbered through the 
faggots on its rafters. It was disquieting to listen 
to — so low as to be almost inaudible, yet always 
there ! Then there was an owl, not your lusty great 
barred owl, with his rousing Hoo-hoo! — Wahoo- 
hoo! — Hoo-hoo-wah ! — Sid had always loved that 
bird — but another one, a ghost of an owl, whose 
call, floating through the forest like the wail of a 
lost soul, can only be approximated by the ghastly 
voice-tones of a lunatic. This cry was hair-raising 
to listen to, as Sid squatted beside his flickering 
camp fire. He got to jumping every time that grisly 
bird uttered his call, — and, as for the cave man 
within him, he was more than ready to take Sid 
shrieking out with him into the night ! 

Sid withstood this combination of insane prompt- 
ings within and weird noises without until the 
higher man in him at length rose up determined to 
have it out with this cave fellow, once for all. Per- 
haps all this was part of the vigil of the Indian boy, 
during his three-days’ fast, he reasoned. If so, it 
would be good to down him and have done with him 
forever, as doubtless the Indian youths had had to 
do! 

“You darned, ignorant, cowardly fool !” his higher 
120 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


self belabored the quaking ass within him. “Just 
to show you what I think of all these perfectly ex- 
plainable night noises, I’m going to turn in and dig 
out a good night’s sleep ! Gorry, — I even wish that 
cougar’d show up, so I could start something real 
in all this!” he snorted, contemptuously. Ruggedly 
indifferent, he forthwith dismissed the night and its 
noises from his mind, poked up his fire, explored 
out into the ravine for some dead night wood that 
would keep burning, and then lay down beside the 
blaze under his lean-to, pulling the browse under 
him and backing up a pile of it against that spot be- 
tween his shoulder blades which is always the first 
to feel the cold. The browse was warm from the 
fire heat. Sid had routed his troubles with one 
mighty effort. Now, with the utmost indifference, 
he felt a comfortable drowsiness stealing over him. 
Victory! 

He awoke with the impression that dawn had 
come. A gray light filled the canyon; he could see 
distinctly. The fire had gone out, and his first move 
was to stumble out among the trees and collect some 
more dead wood. Somehow, he still felt sleepy and 
had not that fresh, invigorated feeling with which 
he usually greeted the dawn. Stupidly he fumbled 


121 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


over his emergency kit, wondering in a vague way 
how long the remnants of it would last him. The 
cold of night was biting in through his back, and he 
was right glad to lie down beside the flickering flames 
again and feel the warmth of the pile of browse 
against his shoulder blades. 

As he lay, with his head resting on one hand, the 
early light mystery solved itself. A narrow red 
rim appeared over the brink of the canyon, — an 
enormous curved line, threaded through the tree 
trunks. It rose and shortened as he watched, grad- 
ually taking round form. Then the moon rose, splen- 
did and silvery, through the tree tops. It was still 
early night ; he had not slept over two hours ! 

Sid gave a grimace of dismay as he watched the 
moon sailing steadily upward high over the canyon 
rim. It meant hours more of this waking and doz- 
ing before he could wear the night through. To- 
morrow his father and their party would come into 
the main canyon; then or never would be the time 
to get in contact with them. He was puzzling over 
practical ways to do this — when out of the dead si- 
lence of the night a sudden scream, like a woman in 
agony, rent the stillness. Sid fumbled hastily in the 
browse for his revolver and then leaped to his feet. 


122 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


He knew that cry! It was the hunting call of the 
cougar, during his night prowlings. Evidently the 
four-footed sharer of his canyon was coming, re- 
turning to his lair ! 

As Sid watched the rim, a movement in the dark 
bushes caught his eye. They parted ; and out on a 
tall pinnacle butte stepped the form of a great cat. 
Great, and black as night was he, as Sid watched 
him, his heart pounding so that he could hear its 
beats through his open mouth. He was — he must be 
— black ! That couldn't be a trick of the moonlight, 
for the moon was on the opposite side of the canyon, 
to the east, and it played full on the sleek body of 
the cougar. 

“The Black Panther of the Navaho! — and he’s 
come!” whispered Sid to himself, hardly breathing. 
“Well, what am I going to do about it — let him come 
down here?” he asked himself, after an indecisive 
period of shivering with excitement and cold. 

Like some bronze Fremiet statue, the Black Pan- 
ther stood silent in the moonlight, his long lithe 
body sloping away behind in graceful curves. Only 
the tip of his black tail twitched slightly. Then his 
superb head moved, and there was a flash of green 
from his eyes as the moonlight caught some gleam 
123 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


of the fire burning in their fuming depths. He ut- 
tered a low, hoarse mew, and his fangs bared as his 
nose caught some taint unfamiliar to him wafted up 
from the canyon below. 

“Gee — I can’t let him come down here!” gasped 
Sid. “What shall I do? — Attack’s always the best 
defense!” He raised the revolver and caught the 
panther through his sights. To what a midget 
creature had he shrunk, high up there on the cliffs ! 
The front sight nearly covered him ; all the rest of 
him was included between the horns of the U on 
his rear bar. 

“Gorry! — I can’t hit him, much less hurt him — 
but I can at least start something!” thought Sid, as 
he held steady and pulled the trigger. The sharp 
spiteful report of the little .32-20 rang out. It was 
followed by as tremendous an exhibition of strength 
and agility as Sid had ever hoped to witness. The 
fright of his own cave man within was as nothing 
compared to the wildly ungovernable scare that his 
sudden shot had given the Black Panther. In one 
mighty leap he jumped to the top of a gaunt bare 
cedar that jutted out behind the pinnacle; in the 
next he had flashed down the tree, striking right and 
left with flail-like blows of his paws, jumped a chasm 
124 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


twenty feet across, and sprang up another tree, leaped 
down again and spun around in circles — simply de- 
mented with terror ! 

Sid laughed grimly. Not a sound did the great 
cat make. It was all done in less than three sec- 
onds, out under the placid beams of the moonlight, 
and then with a last bound the panther disappeared, 
and Sid could hear the underbrush up on the plateau 
cracking and snapping in his wild dash for safety. 

Sid turned and looked down at his browse bed, 
mechanically. A grim sense of mastery, of himself 
and all things around him pervaded him as he took a 
few steps fearlessly up the ravine. He owned that 
whole canyon and everything in it, in his present 
mood! 

“I must have hit him some where, to make him 
carry on like that/’ he muttered, breaking the re- 
volver open to slip in a fresh shell. All desire for 
further sleep had now gone from him. He was 
wide-awake, now, full of a conquering desire to take 
hold of this situation and master it, so that he would 
have some plan of action ready by dawn. Spying 
a dead fir lying in the underbrush, he dragged it out 
and hauled it to the fire, where the flames soon 
reached up to envelop it in a cheerful blaze. 

125 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


He sat down to think things out clearly. His 
mind was keen and active, now, untroubled by any 
more nervous and superstitious fears. Realities 
were plenty enough for him ! reflected Sid, joyously. 
And he Had faced one of them, — the worst — and had 
come off easily victor! 

As he set his mind to work marshaling the events 
of the last two days, a sudden startling thought 
smote him — suppose his party had started a day 
early! It was quite possible; it was probable, even! 
Big John had left him about noon, two days before. 
He had then gone back to the ranch with the buck 
and told them how he, Sid, had gone off on a lone 
hike to the Canyon Cheyo. Suppose then, his father, 
knowing the immense size of the canyon, had be- 
come worried over losing him and had started after 
him the very next day? Even if they went by the 
wooded plateau route they would have arrived at 
the head of the canyon by yesterday afternoon at 
latest! That, then, was the very time he should 
have been signaling with all his might, raising a 
smoke, firing his pistol from the ledge, doing every- 
thing to attract them, instead of fooling around try- 
ing to get out of the Lost Canyon by himself. 

Well, — it was too late, now ! Perhaps they were 
126 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


still in Cheyo — of course they were, — and look- 
ing for him. The dogs would trace his pony, event- 
ually ; they would probably come up his side canyon 
early next morning. If so, it behooved him to get 
up on the ledge and be on watch with keenest of eyes 
and ears. 

And, if they didn't come? Well, he had a half- 
formed plan for that, too. A big spruce grew up 
near the head of the canyon, in such a position that 
by building a fire around its roots he could throw it 
to fall where he could reach the lowest point of that 
fissure up the cougar’s ledge. Taking a quantity of 
stout pegs up with him, he could drive them in and 
so build himself a way out. 

An hour of such plannings and reflections had put 
Sid in a sleepy mood again, and, as the moon was 
now setting in the west, he used up the last of his 
light in gathering firewood and then turned in, to 
fall into a sound sleep. By dawn he was up and 
hungry. The last of his bacon and coffee seemed a 
mighty sparse meal. By now he loathed the taste 
of pinole. It would be another day before he could 
become accustomed to it as a steady diet. It was 
full daylight before he had cleaned up everything 
and was ready for the climb up the flanks of Lost 
127 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Canyon to the high fissure in its dosing wall. Com- 
ing down now seemed to Sid even worse than go- 
ing up, for to his eyes he appeared literally sus- 
pended, by hand and elbow grip alone, over a yawn- 
ing blue depth, misty with the vapors rising from 
the main chasm below. 

He finally reached the narrow ledge at the foot 
of Fat Man’s Misery, and peered cautiously over it, 
straight down below. The top of the green spire of 
the fir rose up to meet him. Nearly a hundred feet 
down, it looked mighty inviting, for that way led to 
freedom and a reunion with his party. But a very 
brief climb down the ledges served to show the utter 
futility of any descent that way, for soon he came 
to a ledge where in going up he had swung out into 
space as if clambering over a house cornice. With- 
out eyes in his feet, no man could find a safe spot to 
plant them under that ledge ! 

But it gave him one advantage, for lying on the 
ledge he could look over and see the whole floor of 
the canyon below. The first thing his eyes fixed 
on was the top of his picket peg. The glint of iron 
came up from its ring, — but there was nothing at- 
tached to it, save a short piece of frayed lariat. 
Pinto was gone ! 


128 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


Sid stared for some time, disbelieving his eyes and 
craning his neck so that he nearly lost his balance 
trying to spy out the horse somewhere up or down 
the canyon. But all was silent and serene, down 
there ; not a sound but the eternal swish of the wind 
through the trees and the occasional chirrup of small 
birds. 

“Gee-roo!” he cried at length. “The darned pin- 
head! I suppose he got frightened and broke his 
halter, once he realized he was alone in the canyon. 
Eve seen a horse drag an iron disk plow clear across 
a field in the unreasoning terror of being alone. — 
Gorry — but this is developing into a regular ad- 
venture !” 

Plenty of the dangerous part of it was all around 
him, now, he realized, as he turned to climb up to 
the cleft again. More than once he cursed his 
temerity for exposing himself to fresh risks, just to 
have a closer look down into the canyon where lay 
his longed-for freedom, — and more than once he had 
to beat back the whimpering cave man in him who 
persisted in trying to break out with slobberings and 
tears! But he negotiated the cleft again, and was 
soon back in the walled confines of Lost Canyon. 


129 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


“Now for the spruce!” he ejaculated to himself, 
cheerily. “It's up to this hombre to make good all 
by his lonesome — just as he started this, all by his 
lonesome !” 

But his heart sank as he began clearing away the 
underbrush around it and gathered the wood for a 
fire. That spruce was all of two feet thick! It 
towered a hundred feet up into the canyon, yet its 
topmost spire was not half the distance to the upper 
rim. Sighting it from across the canyon, Sid judged 
that it would fall with its top some distance below 
the beginnings of that huge granite slab over which 
was the Black Panther's route, but still, it could be 
reached from ledges up there and he was ready to 
dare anything to get out. But then that frightful 
climb up that crack in its surface would begin ! 

He lit the fire. It had to be a small one, to pre- 
vent the tree itself from taking fire, when the whole 
valley would go up in cinders — with him in it ! At 
the end of an hour the trunk was merely blackened, 
and a thin skin of charred bark covered its face to- 
ward the fire. Sid added logs and fought off dis- 
couragement, but it would not down! The whole 
thing seemed so hopeless — a labor of weeks, years, 
centuries ! It would take the patience of an Indian 
130 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


to get that tree down. He gulped a mouthful of 
pinole and ranged up and down the valley — seeking 
fresh game with his revolver, for a meat hunger 
raged within him. He had plenty of time — all the 
time in the world! A log, now and then, was all 
the fire needed ; any more would be dangerous. He 
could hunt, loaf, do anything he pleased — but get 
out. The little valley, however, was absolutely 
gameless. Nothing came down here ; nothing could 
get down here, except an occasional bird and the 
ubiquitous pack rat, one of which had come snuf- 
fing into his lean-to the night before. 

Sid was more than weary of the whole thing — but 
he was learning, from life itself, the meanings of 
the words patience and fortitude. To take things 
as they came ; never to give up, never to be discour- 
aged ; always look for the bright outcome somehow, 
somewhere — it took a strong soul to do that! His 
own soul was growing, under the exercise of the In- 
dian’s virtues — courage, honor, fortitude, faith. He 
knew it ; he felt it within him, as his soul rose strug- 
gling out of its sea of troubles. 

And then, as if Mother Nature had teased him 
long enough, down to Sid’s ears floated the sweetest 
music he had ever heard — the baying of a hound! 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Sid pranced with joy, hand cupped to ear, listening, 
locating, his heart bubbling within him. 

Ow-ow-ow ! it sang, the distant chiming bellow 
of a hound on a hot scent. Surely that was Ruler’s 
voice! Then a squeaking, ripping bray, seemingly 
farther off, whispered through the forest — Pepper, 
by all the red gods ! — Sid was sure of them, now ! 

Sid whipped out his revolver and was about to 
fire their private signal, when a warning thought 
bade him hesitate. Those dogs were far ahead of 
the horses. They were undoubtedly on the trail of 
the Black Panther, who would head here for his lair 
where he could be rid of them. If he fired, the 
panther would turn off and seek some other of his 
haunts, taking the dogs off with him and Sid would 
never be found. Far wiser to hold his fire and let 
him come ! Besides, there would be doings ! 

Sid leaped up on a bowlder where he could com- 
mand the whole canyon and listened with all his ears. 

Ow-ow-ow! Ow-oooooh! A whole chorus of 
doggy music resounded through the forest up over 
the canyon rim. Pepper, Lee, Bourbon, — he recog- 
nized them all, and above the din rose Ruler’s mighty 
horn of a voice, deep, ringing, menacing. They 
were coming nearer, much nearer! And the cat 


132 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


would be on ahead of them, some distance ahead, 
most surely. It was time to be on the lookout for 
him. What should he do? Sid was still undecided 
whether to get into this with the little pop-gun .32-20 
for grouse shooting, when the Black Panther himself 
appeared, galloping along the rim of the canyon, — 
his tail erect and bushy as any household cat’s as he 
leaped surefootedly from crag to crag. That tail 
was laughable ! Sid whooped and jeered. Medicine 
panther, indeed! If the Navaho could only see him 
now! 

The great cat did not so much as glance at him. 
He was making for the granite slab, hotfoot. Sid 
raised his revolver as the panther sprang down it. 
He ran like a fly over the smooth surface, and began 
bounding along the perpendicular face of the ledge. 
If he fired and hit, the cat would fall and there would 
be a knife-and-claw encounter — in a box canyon, 
with no escape for him and no adequate weapon to 
defend himself. That cat could strike with a blow 
that would tear every rib out of his body, and he 
would come with the quickness of lightning. Ele- 
mentary caution told Sid to wait until the men came 
up with their rifles. They had the Black Panther at 
bay, now. 


i33 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Meanwhile the Black Panther, with a single hiss- 
ing snarl at Sid below, had reached the pueblo ledge 
and darted into his cave of refuge. Once inside, he 
sent forth a ferocious growl of defiance, warning all 
the world that he had reached his last stand and was 
going to be ugly if pursued further. Sid laughed, 
and watched the canyon rim. 

Then, — “Ruler ! Ruler!” he screamed in a frenzy 
of delight as the great hound appeared on the cliff 
face, checking himself, puzzled, as he came to the 
last cougar track on the very brim of the canyon. 
Ruler paid Sid no more attention than a flea; his 
mind was completely occupied in studying out this 
hot cat trail. He lifted his muzzle and gave forth 
a mighty bellow. A squealing and yelping back in 
the timber answered him, and presently Pepper and 
Bourbon joined him on the brink, their tails waving 
like flags as the dogs all conferred over the scent 
and then decided to circle. 

“Hi! Ruler! Pep! Bourbon! This way!” 
yelled up Sid, waving his arm to them in the direc- 
tion the cougar had gone. The dogs belled together 
in unison, then, and started weaving along the brink. 
Ruler ran out on another pinnacle and struck hot 
scent, where the Black Panther had only recently 
134 


RULER TAKES A HAND 


landed from his jump. He rolled off a barking- 
treed call and the pups squeaked and rushed over to 
smell it, too. 

“Hi! Hi! — This way , Scotty ! Hyar they are — 
over by the canyon ! Wahoo!” resounded Big John’s 
voice far off through the timber. Sid yelled, and 
then heard the shout of Scotty answering Big John 
and the crash of his horse breaking through the tim- 
ber. Then came a thundering of hoofs, and Big 
John rode up to the brim on the white mustang. 

“Hyar’s the dawgs, Scotty!” he turned around to 
yell back into the forest — then he caught sight of 
Sid, down below! 

“Well, I’ll be plumb teetotally hornswoggled !” he 
roared. “What in my-gosh-amen are you doin’ 
down there, Sid ? Hey — Scotty ! — Here’s Sid ! An’ 
I’ll bet my boots he’s got the varmint down thar with 
him, too!” 


CHAPTER VII 

THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 

T TI, old-timer, this-all’s too many for me — 
I " I Pm a fool and proud of it !” roared Big 
John down at Sid, as Scotty came gal- 
loping up to the brink of Lost Canyon and yelled 
delighted greetings. “What in thunder are ye doin’ 
down thar? How’d ye git there, an’ how’d ye lose 
yore pony? Speak up, hombre! We lost a varmint, 
hyarabouts, — y’ ain’t got him, none, in yore pock- 
ets, has yer?” 

Sid waved a hand up at the cliff dwellings as he 
laughed back gayly, “There’s your bird, John — up in 
a cave yonder. Gorry, but I’m glad to see you all ! 
I’ve been shut up here for two days. That’s the 
Black Panther you’re after and he’s got a lair in a 

cave back of those pueblos ” 

136 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


“Yeah? I jest knowed it war old Neyani’s iden- 
tical black sheep-stealer ! Eh ! Seems like a Navaho 
god or devil named Dsilyi owns him, — but Ruler, 
here, he runs across his trail, ’smornin’, an*, very 
impolite, lights out after the sacred critter! Me, I 
hops the cayuse an’ oozes along, with Scotty 
scratchin’ gravel behind me, an’ hyar we is. We 
found yore pony in Neyani’s corral, Sid, — Say! all 
h — 1 pops loose then, you bet ! Yore dad’s back thar 
now, settin’ on the lid and holdin’ the Injuns quiet. 
You want to show up thar, pretty sudden, or some 
pore Injun’s goin’ to git lynched.” 

“But how in the nation are we ever going to get 
you out, Sid?” called Scotty, who had been survey- 
ing the canyon intently while Big John was speak- 
ing. “It’s all walls and cliffs, as far as I can see.” 

“Search me!” grinned Sid, shrugging his shoul- 
ders. “And how are you two going to get down to 

help me smoke out the cougar Mind the dogs, 

boys !” he broke off suddenly. “They’ll be tumbling 
into the canyon, next, if you don’t get leashes on 
them, pronto.” 

Ruler and the pups had now worked around to 
the brink of the granite slide. The big hound was 
even intrepidly venturing down it, with Pepper at 
i37 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


his heels. Big John roared ; Scotty yelled ; Sid aimed 
his revolver and spanged a bullet on the rock in 
front of them, for a sheer fall down into the canyon 
threatened them if they tried to go any further. 

“Back up out of thar, Ruler — you ole fool crit- 
ter !” shouted Big John, shying a stone over with 
deft aim. The dogs yelped and started back, but a 
challenging snarl, ringing out from the cave, brought 
them all back again, barking madly. Ruler ran to 
the edge of the vertical ledges and put his paws on 
the nearest, bellowing his disgust at being unable to 
follow further. 

“So there’s where he is, eh?” cried Scotty, reach- 
ing down to his scabbard for his .405. “If I could 
only get a shot from here !” 

He peered across at the cliff dwellings, but the 
Black Panther’s lair was, of course, invisible from 
Scotty’s position. 

“Don’t shoot, kid !” warned Big John. “We ain’t 
ready yet. Whar’s yore rifle, Sid ?” he called down. 

Sid waved the little .32-20. “This is all I’ve got. 
Can’t you see? — I’m locked up in here,” he yelled. 
“I climbed up by yonder wall, and now I can’t get 
out of this box canyon or I’d have met you fellows 
long ago.” 


138 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


“Yaas? — it works like the nigger's eel trap, eh? 
Ketches 'em cornin' and goin' !" hee-hawed Big 
John. “Cat in one end ; kid in t'other ! — waal, how 
are we goin' to git you out? I ain’t fixin' to bom- 
bard no varmint, with you down thar, right plumb 
intimate with him, nohow !" he declared vigorously. 

“Say! — chuck me down a lariat and I'll get out, 
all right — both your lariats !" called up Sid, suddenly, 
as a scheme for escape came to him. 

“All right, son, anything that's oum is youm," 
grinned Big John as he lifted his lariat coil from 
its saddle hook. After a few moments of untying, 
the ropes soared out from the cliff walls, to drop 
down into the underbrush. 

“Scotty, you watch the trick panther’s hang-out 
while I climbs down an' ties up them pisen-mean 
houn' dawgs,” said Big John, as Sid started retriev- 
ing the lariats and coiling them up. The cowman 
dismounted and tied his mustang back in the timber. 
After a time his long form began sliding down the 
steep shale slopes above the granite slab, where, at 
the top of it, he drove in his heels and regained his 
feet. 

“You’ll obleege me, Sid, by rockin’ them dawgs 
from whar you are," he called to Sid, who was wait- 
139 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


ing to see the outcome before putting off on his own 
perilous climb. 

Sid “obleeged,” sending the pups yelping up the 
slope. Ruler was harder to manage. By no per- 
suasion could he be coaxed to leave his position, snif- 
fing and whining with the implacable persistence of 
a hound over the last foot of cougar trail that he 
could possibly follow. Big John had at length to 
climb down the crevice and haul him up by main 
strength. Sid breathed freely when man and dog 
once more reached the comparative safety of the 
upper slopes. 

“Well, — so long, fellows!” he called out. “I can 
let myself down to a fir tree beyond that wall,” he 
explained, pointing out the blocked end of the can- 
yon. “It lands me in a side chasm of Cheyo Can- 
yon, where I’ve cached my saddle and rifle. I’ll 
whoopee, when Pm through the cleft. Then burn 
out the cat, if you can, and ride down to join 
me. 

“All right, old-timer, — good luck to ye!” called 
Big John. “We’ll git him, somehow.” 

Sid made the climb up to the cleft in the end of 
the wall for the last time. Once down through it, 
he secured the two lariats together and let down 
140 


THE EIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


their combined length. To his delight they reached 
well into the top of the fir tree. Then he tied the 
upper end to a stout sapling growing near the ledge 
and tested it for strength. Taking the rope in his 
hands, he raised his voice in a loud Whoopee! and 
began the descent. 

Distant shouts answered him, and then the bellow 
of rifles. They were making it hot for the Black 
Panther, Sid hoped, as he picked his way down from 
ledge to ledge. With the confidence born of the 
lariat in his grip, it was now easy climbing. A 
scramble down from one huge slab to the next be- 
low, often lowering himself vertically by the rope, 
brought him at last to where he could grasp the 
swaying top of the fir tree. Then, abandoning the 
friendly lariat, he climbed down rapidly, and with 
a mighty whoop of joy stood on firm soil once more 
— free ! 

Then came the reaction — from all the strain and 
fatigue of the past three days. A delicious sense of 
ease, of victory and repose, crept over him as he 
retrieved his rifle and saddle and then rested indo- 
lently against the latter, waiting for Scotty and Big 
John to come down into the canyon. He had had his 
three-days’ trial, just like any Indian boy. There had 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


been no starvation, no vision; but there had been 
plenty to test his nerve and courage and resource- 
fulness. He decided that he was more in love with 
the great wild outdoors than ever. His life would be 
here, that was sure, for to him it was happiness. 
Just what he would do was still somewhat indis- 
tinct, but there were lots of purposeful, worth-while 
activities to be carried on, wholly in the wilderness. 
Something practical, something with an object for 
those benighted children of the forest, the Indians, 
was as far as he could see for the present. 

It was perhaps an hour later when Ruler came in 
sight around a jutting cliff down the canyon, with 
the three pups trotting along just behind him. After 
them appeared the tossing heads of the ponies, the 
flash of sunlight on Big John’s silver-mounted chaps 
and the white glare of Scotty’s tall sombrero. As 
they caught sight of him, they burst into a gallop and 
waved their hats. 

“Well, how’s the Black Panther — did you get 
him?” laughed Sid indolently from his saddle as 
they rode up. 

“Naw,” growled Big John. “I climbs round whar 
I can sort of carrom him, like, with the thutty-thutty, 
an’ for every whang we hears him spit back, — growl 
142 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


fer whang, even-Steven — but it don’t interest him 
none. Then Scotty, here, he tears loose with that old 
Four-O-Five pursuader, like it hed a half stick of 
dynamite into it, an’ that’s jest a leetle too much 
fer kitty ! He crep’ back into a hole in his cave an’ 
pulls the hole in atter him, like a tyrantula; an’ so 
we guv him up.” 

Sid glanced up the cliff wall to where the lariats 
hung in a long black streak down from the cleft 
ledge. 

“I was weeping real tears over leaving these good 
lariats behind, boys,” he smiled, cherubically, “but 
now I see we’ve got a use for them. Scotty and I’ll 
climb up there, some day, into Lost Canyon, while 
you and father run the panther with the dogs. Then 
we’ll have a nice roof party on top of those cliff 
houses — eh, Les?” 

“Sure thing!” agreed Scotty. “But, Sid, the thing 
to do now is to get back to Neyani’s hogan as fast 
as we can. You see, Ruler picked up your pony’s 
tracks in the canyon yesterday, and led us out to 
Neyani’s place. They’re in lots of trouble out there. 
This medicine panther, as they insist he is, has been 
taking one of Neyani’s sheep every few nights — a 
regular scourge. So what do they do but think that 
i43 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Dsilyi, their demigod, is angry with the house of 
Neyani and, therefore, it must be because someone 
has committed a crime and the panther is being sent 
as a punishment. The suspicion rests on young 
Niltci, Neyani’s son, a harmless, industrious Indian 
boy, so far as I can see, and a peach of a silversmith. 
Well, Neyani was telling us all about it, when John, 
I think it was, spied your pony up in Neyani’s corral ! 
— Cracky, but thunder broke loose then, you can bet ! 
John, here, was for wringing Neyani’s neck,” 
laughed Scotty, “and only your father saved it for 
him. Of course, they all protested their ignorance 
of you, and swore that the pony had come trotting 
to their hogan of his own accord. First habitation 
he saw of any human beings, I suppose. Well, any- 
way, Neyani turns and blames the whole thing on 
Niltci and accuses him of murdering you ! Of 
course Colonel Colvin interfered, then, but I’m 
afraid the poor boy’s doomed, for the Navaho are 
holding their great fire dance to-night to see who’s 
guilty, and the least unfavorable omen will settle it 
for him. We all drew off and camped near by, to 
try to save Niltci if it comes to the worst. Colonel 
Colvin told us that the situation had to be handled 
with the utmost delicacy. We couldn’t kill the sa- 
144 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


cred medicine cougar without starting an Indian up- 
rising; we couldn’t prove Niltci innocent with you 
unaccounted for — the whole thing was a mess ! 
Well, early, before dawn this morning the Black 
Panther came again ” 

“Funny, that war!” broke in Big John. “Shore 
tickled this hombre’ s sense of the reedic’lous ! Thar 
we was, afraid to make a move fer fear of offending 
them pore Injuns’ feelin’s, with their medicine pan- 
ther an’ all that. But Ruler, here, he don’t know 
nothin’ about no sacred panther! All he smells is 
cat , red hot, an’ — most impolite, — takes out after 
the heap big medicine trick panther ! I pilgrims out 
of me blankets and heaves a saddle on wild Bill, an’ 
Scotty an’ I rolls our tails after thet b’ilin’ of dawgs, 
leavin’ the Colonel to fix up some lie that’ll pacify the 
Injuns. Now we shore is wanted back to home, 
boys ! I’ll tote that saddle of yourn, Sid, somehow, 
an’ Scotty, you carry the extra rifle while Sid takes 
yore stirrup and runs with us. Let’s get movin’ — 
we’ve got all of ten miles to lope.” 

Sid got to his feet and passed up the saddle to Big 
John. Then Scotty took his rifle and, with Sid get- 
ting a grip on the stirrup, the ponies started canter- 
ing down the side chasm. In a mile more they were 
i45 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


out in the main canyon and riding steadily up its 
huge amphitheater of cliffs. 

Sid was dog-tired with the alternate walking and 
trotting of the horses when, shortly before sunset, 
the wide plain of the Navaho settlement came to 
view. Running with a stirrup-hold was far easier 
than he had anticipated ; walking was another story, 
for a horse’s stride is so long as to take a very rapid 
pace to keep up with it. As they looked about over 
the semidesert plain it was hard to realize that 
there must be at least fifty hogans in plain sight at 
that very moment. But, so carefully concealed were 
they that if this party of theirs had been hostile in- 
vaders they would be walking right in to a first-class 
ambush. 

But, as they drew near Neyani’s, the entire vicin- 
ity seemed dotted with busy Indians, all preparing 
for the great Fire Dance. From every direction they 
were dragging in wood, small dead mesquites, grease- 
wood bushes, anything that would burn. A huge pile 
of it twenty feet high was being assembled near the 
hogan, with an inclosure of brush formed in a ring 
about it. Indians passed them, gayly decorated with 
barbaric jewelry, in white cotton shirts and colored 
leggings, the older ones wearing broad,, striped 
146 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


“chief” blankets. All were noisy, and busy on one 
errand or another, and behind brushwood screens 
they could see the young men and warriors of the 
various clans and secret societies decking themselves 
in ceremonial costumes. 

Then Colonel Colvin came galloping out, his face 
one huge smile of glad relief and astonishment. 

“Sid, my boy! — where have you been? What in 
the devil has happened to you, son?” he cried, as he 
reined up his horse to lean over and wring Sid’s 
hand. “You have come just in the nick of 
time. It will at least relieve young Niltci of any 
suspicion of having harmed a white man. But the 
Fire Dance ceremony must go ahead, I fear. Any 
news of that infernal panther, John?” 

“Yaas; the dawgs<run him into a leetle box can- 
yon back thar in Cheyo — an’ you can steal my hoss 
if thar ain’t Sid, ez ornery and ez nat’ral ez ever! 
I told ye not to worry, Colonel,” he wagged his head. 
“Thet rope’s still waitin’ for him! He dumb up 
thar, an’ then he couldn’t git out again. The var- 
mint’s got a lair in that canyon, too, in a cave behind 
some of them cliff houses.” 

“So you didn’t get him, eh? That’s bad!” said 
Colonel Colvin, disappointedly. “He'll come back 
i47 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


for some more lamb in a day or so. I’ve sent for 
Major Hinchman, but he’ll get here too late to do any 
good, for the Indians are so wrought up that they’re 
like to throw Niltci into the big fire if anything goes 
wrong during the ceremonies. He and Neyani are 
to be leaders in it, so they’ll be right in the lime- 
light. 

“I tell you what we’ll do !” exclaimed the Colonel 
suddenly, as they walked the horses toward the 
hogan, “we’ll break camp right now, and get every- 
• thing ready for the ride across the desert to the 
Grand Canyon. Then if things go wrong at the 
dance we’ll watch our chance and get Niltci away 
and take him with us across the desert, until this 
business blows over. You, Sid and Scotty, keep near 
him. Watch where they put him if they tie him 
up; get him free and join us out on the plain, as it 
will be pitch dark. We’ll start right out and put 
fifty miles between us and this hogan during the 
night. I’ll strike for Lee’s Ferry on the Big Colo- 
rado.” 

Sid and Scotty winked at each other gleefully. A 
cutting-out party of this nature was right in their 
line! Big John and the Colonel rode on to their 
camp, while the boys dismounted at the hogan and 
148 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


went inside. Neither Neyani nor Niltci were any- 
where in sight, for they were off in the brush some- 
where, dressing for their parts. But a group of old 
medicine men were making sand paintings on the 
floor of the hogan, pouring various colored sands 
deftly through their fingers. The boys looked 
around curiously, at the huge beams of the hogan 
slanting up overhead and the square smoke hole 
over a small fire in the center which gave light for 
the sand-painting ceremonies. Around the walls ran 
a log-and-clay shelf which served as both bench and 
sleeping bunks. Pottery water jars stood in the 
corners, with granary baskets of corn and pinyon 
nuts and bowls of corn meal. The young girl knelt 
beside the fire, making pike bread by pouring a thin 
batter deftly through a crack in her fingers on a 
smooth, hot stone. As fast as a layer cooked she 
rolled it around itself and spread a fresh batch. 
Paper-thin pancakes of corn meal were they! Her 
mother crouched in a corner, grinding meal in a stone 
trough with a long stone pestle. 

Then they turned to watch the sand paintings. 
Brilliantly hued, they told the legends of the Navaho 
brought down from the Far North — Dsilyi in the 
house of the Snakes, who taught him the prayer- 
149 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


stick mysteries ; Dsilyi in the Rainbow Hogan of the 
Butterfly Woman, who gave him command of the 
Rain Lightnings; Dsilyi in the cave of the Sacred 
Mountain, where the Four Panthers taught him the 
secrets of the cultivated plants. It all became intel- 
ligible to Sid as he studied out the symbolical figures, 
while one of the medicine men explained him the 
legends. 

Later came the young men of the tribe, to look in 
and study the paintings. It was as good as the Iliad 
was to the Greeks, thought Sid, — an easily read sym- 
bolism of Navaho heroes and gods that was being 
passed down to the younger generation in this way. 

Then every one trooped out to the inclosure 
around the brush pile. Just at dusk the qcali (medi- 
cine chanter) stationed himself to one side and be- 
gan the chant of the legend of Dsilyi. Immediately 
torches were set to the wood, and great roaring 
flames forty feet high swept up into the night. The 
heat was so intense that the boys had to shield their 
faces with their buckskin gloves, but into the narrow 
ring between them and the fire dashed a band of 
twenty young men headed by Niltci. They were 
daubed all over with white clay, but it seemed be- 
yond the power of human endurance for any one to 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


remain there a moment. Each youth bore in his 
hand a wand tipped with eagle down, representing 
snowflakes. Writhing and twisting, they advanced 
to the flames, their object being to bum the down 
to balls of red cinders, while the qcali chanted the 
story of how the gods changed the snowflakes to 
mud balls and pelted the Utes w r ith them when 
Dsilyi was surrounded and nearly overpowered by 
his enemies. The performers lashed their way to- 
ward the fire, their long hair singed and smoking, 
their eyelids scorched and their faces streaming 
sweat. Niltci wriggled along the ground like a liz- 
ard, his prayer stick advanced toward the fire, his 
back tortured by the blistering heat. So eager was 
he to do his part well that he overdid it, for, when 
the others arose, whirling their wands with red-hot 
cinders at the ends, his was burned off and showed 
only a tiny point of fire. 

At this a grunt of disapproval ran around the 
spectators and accusing fingers pointed at him. 
Then, at a certain measure in the chant all the wands 
blossomed into snowballs again, a clever trick done 
by a string through a hole near the end and a sec- 
ond ball of down concealed in the hand. All but 
Niltci’s ! His wand end was burned off, string and 
151 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


all. A shout of rage greeted him as he stood irreso- 
lute, the others dancing about, waving their prayer 
sticks. Then the performers ran out of the inclos- 
ure, and the first of the legend plays was fin- 
ished. 

A muttering and murmuring ran around the circle 
of Navahos. It looked bad for the poor youth, al- 
ready. Sid and Scotty whispered together, wonder- 
ing how they were going to get in touch with him if 
matters grew any worse. They had not yet formed 
a plan, when the qcali started chanting again and two 
old chiefs of the tribe danced in, dressed in the cere- 
monial costumes of the Plumed Arrow-Swallowers. 
The leader was Neyani, and, as they watched him 
closely, the boys could detect a nervousness in all his 
movements. The honor of his family was at stake, 
now, since Niltci had bungled his part, for the omens 
were going against him and his. The qcali sang 
the story of how Dsilyi went to the Rainbow Hogan 
of the Butterfly Woman, where the Plumed Arrow- 
Swallowers put his feet on the white lightnings and 
gave him command of the rains. At this climax of 
the mystery play he suddenly stopped chanting, while 
Neyani and the other chief halted and raised their 
arrows up vertically. The spectators held their 

152 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


breath. Slowly, inch by inch, the long arrows disap- 
peared down the throats of the performers. To any- 
one who did not know that the arrows were made of 
collapsible reeds, the illusion of swallowing them 
was complete. 

But Neyani, in the eagerness of his grasp, had 
somehow bent his arrow. By no force of self-tor- 
ture could he make it go down further ! Stubbornly 
it stuck, while a mighty growl rose from all the 
Navaho watching him. A babel of voices burst out 
in accusations; fingers pointed, knives flashed out. 
Over near the chiefs Sid could see his father shaking 
his head anxiously, while Big John beside him fum- 
bled at his gun holster. 

Dramatically the qcali raised his arm and pointed, 
while a dead silence struck the throng motionless. 

“Neyani — it is thou!” his voice rang out. “Be- 
hold the judgment of Dsilyi! Confess! Confess 
thou before the Navaho!” he declared in guttural 
Indian speech. 

The boys could not understand a word of it, but 
his tones and actions were unmistakable. Equally 
significant were Neyani’s. He drew forth the arrow 
and dashed it on the ground. “Not I ! — Not I !” his 
head shook in negation. “These years have never 
i53 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


yet taken blame ! This viper in my house, it is !” he 
yelled, turning to point at Niltci, who stood cowering 
without the inclosure. 

“Ai ! — We shall see !” exclaimed the qcali, signifi- 
cantly. He waved his arm for the final ceremony to 
begin, and then took up the legend of Dsilyi again, 
telling of his final defeat of the Utes. Once more 
Niltci’s band came charging in, this time beating each 
other on the backs with flaming torches, signifying 
the utter rout of the Utes by Dsilyi. Round and 
round the scorching inclosure they raced. The smell 
of singed hair and scorched flesh told that many a 
blanket would hide a sore back next morning! In 
the middle of the third round, Niltci, who was be- 
laboring the youth in front of him with the eager- 
ness of despair, tripped over a root and fell sprawl- 
ing on the ground. Instantly the whole tribe rose 
as one man and swarmed over him. That last omen 
had been more than enough to damn him ! Twenty 
hands grabbed for the poor unfortunate, while the 
boys shoved their way into the throng, eager to be 
of some help, yet not knowing what to do in the pres- 
ent fanatical mood of the Indians. Colonel Colvin 
beckoned vigorously for them to stand aside and keep 
out of it. 


154 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


Niltci was dragged to his feet and hustled, amid 
the yelling of angry voices, to the nearest tree. Big 
John pranced over with a six-gun in each hand, about 
to wade into the whole crowd, regardless, but the 
Colonel grabbed him and forced his guns down. For 
the present there seemed no immediate danger, for 
buckskin thongs were being passed around Niltci in- 
stead of the rope which the cowman had usually seen 
produced by a frenzied mob. Then the Indians stood 
aside, waiting the judgment of the qcali. 

The latter stalked forward and began a long 
harangue. He seemed urging Niltci to confess, but 
the boy shook his head, his eyes piteous with injured 
innocence, his face looking at them terrified over 
the fearful predicament into which the superstition 
of the Black Panther had brought him. 

“What does he say, Neyani?” demanded Colonel 
Colvin. “The white men do not understand this at 
all !” 

Neyani shrugged his shoulders. He was through 
with his renegade son, it was quite evident. His in- 
terest was merely that for some criminal. 

“Perhaps a man in the desert lies dead because of 
him ; perhaps some girl she lives dishonored by him. 
Who knows? For that Dsilyi his Black Panther 
155 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


sends. But the sun god, he tell,” he remarked, stol- 
idly. 

“What do you mean?” asked the Colonel, quickly. 

“To-morrow he must look at the sun god till he 
tell. No good !” explained Neyani, coolly. 

As the qcali finished, a group of young braves 
stepped forward and bound Niltci so that he faced 
to the east. Then a fork was secured about his head, 
the purpose evidently being for someone to hold it 
so that the poor youth would have to face the desert 
sun until its torture forced him to tell something or 
invent a confession if he had none. 

The whites looked at one another significantly. 
“Well, boys — we must be getting back to camp,” 
said the Colonel. “Neyani, the white men think that 
your son is innocent. There is some other reason 
for the Black Panther. But to-morrow Major 
Hinchman will come. My advice to you is to wait 
until the White Father arrives, before doing any- 
thing that you yourself may regret for all the rest 
of your life.” 

And with this he turned away, leaving the old 
Indian shaking his head and staring at him stol- 
idly. 

Two hours later all was quiet. The Navahos had 
156 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


departed to their hogans; the desert was as still, 
under its canopy of stars, as if never the doings of 
foolish men had disturbed its peace. And, out to- 
ward the west moved the Colvin pack train, silent 
and shrouded in darkness. There was yet an hour 
before the moon would rise. 

About two miles from Neyani’s hogan the horses 
were reined up and Sid and Scotty dismounted. 
They were about to vanish into the darkness of the 
sage, when Big John threw a long leg over the white 
mustang’s saddle and leaped to the ground. 

“Hyar ! I’m goin’ to be in on this !” he declared, 
truculently, handing the Colonel his reins. “Them 
pesky boys is all right, I’ll admit, to save having it 
proved on me, but thar’s times when they needs a 
man around — which same is me !” 

Colonel Colvin hesitated a moment. Then — “I 
guess I can manage the pack train alone, John. 
You’d better go,” said he at length. “Use no vio- 
lence, now, unless you have to. I’ll ride the horses 
slowly toward the Canyon. Good luck to you, boys.” 

He waved them a farewell as the three set out. 
All of them were busily thinking over some plan to 
rescue Niltci that would work. To steal upon him, 
even under cover of darkness was playing the In- 
157 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


dian’s own game, they knew, a tremendously difficult 
one for mere whites to succeed at undetected. To 
make a big detour and come down by way of the 
sheep corral would be fatal, for the dogs there would 
surely give a warning. Niltci would undoubtedly be 
guarded. If they overpowered the guards, it would 
be known who had kidnaped the prisoner. That 
would never do ! 

“As I see it, fellows, the only stunt for us is for 
one of us to entice Niltci’s guards away for a time, 
while the other two get to him and cut him loose,” 
said Sid in low tones as they crept through the sage. 
“Any one got any notion of what might attract a 
Navaho’s curiosity?” he inquired. 

There was a silence as the others shook their 
heads. Then Big John spoke up. “I got a better 
layout than that, Sid. These Injuns are supersti- 
tious, an' thar’s one thing they’re scairt of wuss than 
anythin’ else. You-all got plenty of matches?” he 
asked suddenly. 

The boys stopped and got out their emergency 
kits. Out of each they produced a bundle of about 
fifty matches. “Ef these was the good old brimstone 
sticks they’d go better,” said Big John enigmatically, 
taking them in his big paw, “but I’ll make out with 
158 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


them, all right. You boys run along, now, an’ git 
as near Niltci’s tree as ye kin. Then lay low and 
watch my smoke.” 

He disappeared into the sage without a further 
word. Sid and Scotty looked at each other, puz- 
zled, but they knew Big John had a mighty good 
head on him, and he would be unlikely to try any- 
thing that would not work. As they drew near 
Neyani’s hogan they redoubled their caution, crawl- 
ing through the sage and taking advantage of every 
little ridge of rock. At length they were quite near 
Niltci’s tree and well concealed in a patch of scrub 
bear grass. They could make out the Indian boy’s 
blurred form, now, bound upright to the tree. Be- 
side him on the ground squatted two Navaho guards, 
silent, motionless. They might be dead, for all the 
movement either made; but that they were quite 
awake and on watch the boys could not doubt. 

For a long time nothing happened. All the desert 
was still as death, shrouded in the gloom of a faint 
mist that hung over the barren ground. Overhead 
the stars swung in their great courses, but their light 
penetrated but feebly through the dust and mist and 
haze of smoke that drifted over from the ashes of 
the great fire. 


i59 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Then — “Hist!” whispered Scotty, at length, grip- 
ping Sid’s arm. “What’s that?” 

There, quite near, — over by a little nest of bowl- 
ders — something moved! Dim, dark, hardly dis- 
cernible, a round, black head peered out, advancing 
fearsomely, with two phosphorescent disks of fire 
glaring at them, balefully! — Then a wild, mortal 
shriek rent the night! It was the Black Panther, 
himself ! 

The boys tugged feverishly at their revolvers, their 
hair standing on end with fright. As for the two 
Navahos, one wild leap, one terror-stricken grunt 
of dismay, and they were off like the wind, bolting 
out into the sage. It was not until they were some 
distance away that they raised terrified screams of 
fright, running like deer as they yelled. 

The panther crept nearer, and, just as Sid was 
about to fire, Big John’s low voice called out to them 
reassuringly. 

“Don’t shoot! — Up an’ git young Niltci, boys!” 
he gritted. — “How did my fox-fire look?” 

Sid went nearly hysterical with the reaction. 
“Was that you, John? It was great! Simply 
great !” he chuckled, springing forward to wring the 
cowman’s hand. Bubbling with delight, they all 
160 


THE FIRE DANCE OF THE NAVAHO 


dashed for Niltci. Swiftly his thongs were cut, 
and then, each grabbing an arm, they started for the 
canyon. 

“Run, fellers — I’m a good kitty, all right, but we 
ain’t got no time to lose!” whispered Big John, 
hoarsely. — “Listen !” 

Voices and yells came from hogans all about them. 
The night was hideous with uproar — then it sud- 
denly ceased and all was silent again. 

“Well, I’ll be derned !” grunted Big John, as they 
hustled along, “what d’ye make of that ? — I’m wise, 
boys !” he laughed. “Them brave bucks has told the 
hogans that their friend, Mister Black Panther, has 
come and took Niltci — an’ they’re all sti ekin’ close 
to home, scairt to death ! Hep, boys — hep !” 


CHAPTER VIII 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 

*• HORE Pm shy a good hat!” exclaimed Big 
John whimsically, as they slackened speed 
and began to look about through the gloom 
for some sign of the Colonel and the pack train. He 
took off his old Montana Stetson and twirled it rue- 
fully in his hands. It was black as the night, where 
it had been gray, and out of two holes up near the 
crown he stuck two fingers and wiggled them at the 
boys. “I shore oughtta go on the stage after that 
panther stunt, boys,” he drawled, his face breaking 
into a slow grin. “When I left you, I worked 
around to whar the Injuns hed their big fire an' got 
me some charcoal. Then I crep' over to them rocks 
an’ lay thar, waitin' till you come, and blackin' up the 
ole cage all over good. Then I cuts two holes in her, 
an' dolls her up with yore matches tied in two round 
162 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


bundles. Arter a while, when I thinks you-all shore 
must be hyarabouts, I spits on me hands and rubs 
them matches good. Shore ’twas funny!” he 
chuckled. “I looks me ole sombrero over an’ like to 
hev scairt myself to death with them two fox fire 
eyes glarin’ at me out’n thet black hat ! But ’twan’t 
a fleabite to the way them redskins lit out, an’ you 
two boys allowed to sell yore lives dear when I lets 
out that yelp intended to represent a panther’s call 
an’ oozes out into the scenery!” 

“I was just frozen stiff with fright,” admitted 
Scotty frankly. “We thought it was the Old Boy, 
himself, coming for us! — I’m not sure about it, even 
now !” 

Niltci grunted and stopped, transfixed with aston- 
ishment. “You?” he asked, incredulously, pointing 
his finger at Big John. 

“Shore ’twas me, Injun. Shore !” cackled the lat- 
ter, facetiously. 

“No!” 

“Thunder, yes !” came back Big John, raising his 
voice all he dared. 

“NO ! — Heap big lie !” squeaked Niltci. “Dsilyi’s 
panther him come !” he insisted. 

“I tell you, it was a stroke of genius, John!” 

163 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


laughed Sid ; “the Indians must think it's all over, or 
inside, with Niltci, now! That idea came to me, 
back there when we were freeing him; so I kept his 
thongs so they wouldn't find anything. Makes it all 
the more miraculous, you see. They won’t think of 
following us.” 

Big John’s jaw dropped and he stopped dead. 
“Sid, you shore has a headpiece on you !” he declared, 
admiringly. “I never thought of that myself. My 
idee was jest to heave a gosh-almighty scare into ’em 
— but I never thought I’d get you boys, too!” and 
he broke into a huge chuckle again. 

A tiny point of light winked twice out of the gloom 
ahead, and then all was impenetrable darkness again. 

“Over this way, fellows,” whispered Scotty, who 
had noticed it, “that’s the Colonel’s flasher. He must 
have heard us.” 

They headed over, and presently the dim outlines 
of the horses showed up. Colonel Colvin greeted 
them delightedly and then explained briefly to Niltci 
his plan. The Indian boy agreed, submissively, and 
they all set off down into the canyon. A mile 
further they broke into a trot with Niltci hanging 
to the Colonel’s stirrup. 

“Of course there’s plenty of good hunting, boys, 
164 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


all over this wonderful Arizona,” said the Colonel 
as they rode along. “All through the canyons of the 
pine belt south of Flagstaff there is deer and bear, 
and we could reach it by riding southwest from here. 
But I want you to see the Grand Canyon, — the big 
sight that no American should permit himself to 
miss, — and the way to get it all, and first-class big 
game hunting besides, is from that vast network of 
canyons and crags back of the north rim. IPs a 
desert ride, either way we decide to go, southwest 
to the pine belt or west to the Ferry. We’ll take 
the latter. It’s eighty miles from here and just one 
drink the whole way. Here’s where our oats-and- 
water scheme scintillates, for we can do it in three 
days, with good grain feed and water enough to keep 
the horses full of pep.” 

As they debouched from Canyon Cheyo the pack 
train was halted to make these adjustments. All the 
pannier water cans were filled from the brook and 
a full bucket of oats taken out of them was fed to 
each horse. The rest was put in gunny sacks and the 
loads redistributed so that there was an extra cayuse 
for Niltci to ride. They fixed up an improvised sad- 
dle made of a tarp, a folded blanket and a cinch 
strap for him, and then all the spare stuff was cached. 
165 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Bidding the running stream a last good-by, the 
train started climbing up a mighty ravine that led 
out to the vast desert plateau to the west. 

Arrived at the head of it, a high mesa greeted 
them, stretching for miles to the northwest. Under 
its flanks the party rode, while the soft, cold desert 
wind sifted the desert sand in a faintly audible tick- 
ing around the horses’ feet. It was a tired and sleepy 
party that saw the sunrise, five hours later, with 
thirty miles of travel behind them. Bare desolation, 
and color, color, color, everywhere the eye roamed ! 
Blue cliffs, red cliffs, yellow cliffs, black buttes ; and, 
to the west, the enchanted walls of the ghostly White 
Mesa. 

During the heat of the day the train halted under 
the shade of a rocky nest of bowlders as high as a 
house, and the horses were fed and watered and 
picketed out to nibble what sparse vegetation they 
could find. The four men spread out bed rolls, and, 
with the four dogs insisting on bunking in their 
midst, slept in an indescribable huddle, too tired to 
boot them off. 

It was black night and cold when Sid awoke again. 
The others slept around him. A distant coyote raised 
his piercing cry, soft and plaintive in the vast soli- 
1 66 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


tude ; the blurred forms of the horses dotted the lit- 
tle swale in front of their camp. Then came the 
false dawn of the moon, and Big John awoke and 
nudged Niltci, whom he had elected assistant horse 
wrangler, and they began silently to pack the ani- 
mals. 

The sight of them at work was too much for Sid ; 
he awoke his father and Scotty, for at least they 
could attend to the saddle horses and help break 
camp. They were nearly ready to mount when an 
enormous red moon rose slowly over the mesas to 
the east. Higher and higher it soared, becoming 
smaller, rounder and more silvery as it quitted the 
haze over the desert. Then, in a splendor of white 
light, clear as daylight and pricking out the buttes 
in staring porcelain and inky shadows, the pack 
train headed west. It was all weirdly beautiful; 
color was there none, but of sharp contrast, of 
strangely rugged and distorted rock formations, of 
vague and ghostly desert distances there was such a 
play as to place one in imagination in some selenitic 
valley of the moon. 

The afternoon of the third day found the pack 
train climbing down the frightful escarpments of 
a high red butte that abutted on the Colorado. There 
161 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


had been no adventure, no sandstorm, no thirst tor- 
ture, no accident ; but all were weary, the men silent, 
the dogs limping painfully, the horses plodding on 
persistently. A ringing whoop from Big John and 
the roar and rumble of waters announced the sight- 
ing of the famous Red River. Out of the gray ram- 
parts of Cataract Canyon it swept, to flood past them 
in boiling riffles, majestic and purposeful in its head- 
long drive for the sea — the river that has more to 
show for its labors than any other river in the whole 
world. 

Pistol shots brought ferrymen down to the oppo- 
site bank, to man the flatboat which crosses here by 
an overhead wire and trolley wheel tackle. Swiftly 
it came over, driven by the rapid current impinging 
on its sides. It was big enough to accommodate 
the whole party, and, paying the toll, the horses were 
ridden onto its capacious flat floor. The reluctant 
dogs were booted aboard and then the boat set out 
for its return trip across the Colorado. As the water 
boiled and swirled around its gunwales Sid looked 
downstream at the mighty chasm of black gneiss into 
which the river plunged with a dull and ceaseless 
boom like the thunder of a distant Niagara. He 
could not keep his eyes off it. From there on the 
1 68 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


canyon would become inconceivably grander and 
more majestic, one of the seven wonders of the 
world, — yet what was it, in the infinite program of 
Nature, but an inconsiderable trickle in an incon- 
spicuous crevice on the enormous round globe which 
is our world? If this remnant of a stream was so 
awe-inspiring to man, what must it have been when 
that whole vast inland sea which reached clear up 
to Wyoming was flooding out through these same 
gates to the ocean! The very thought gave Sid a 
glimpse, — like a rift through the clouds at some 
mountain top, — of the unapproachable dignity of 
Nature. Man, at his best, is but a mere insult in her 
presence, an audacious, unspanked microbe, that has 
occupied and will occupy but a brief period in her 
cosmic processes, even when his whole history is 
told from start to finish. 

A day was spent resting up at the ranch and giv- 
ing the horses unlimited oats and water once more, 
and then they pushed southwest through a bare and 
sparse country to where Buckskin Mountain domi- 
nated the Kaibab Plateau, huge, gray and imposing 
in his nine thousand feet of snow-topped height. 
Once around its flanks they were in a fine country 
of tall western pine, with every ravine leading to the 
169 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


rocky buttes and parapets and pinnacles that over- 
hung the enormous slopes of the Grand Canyon 
basin. Back in the pines a short distance from the 
rim they established camp. The boys’ little green 
five-by-six-foot wall tent was set up, with a pair of 
shears in front and its ridge rope run back to en- 
circle the trunk of a pine three feet thick. The little 
tent was a wonder of a forest home, for its five 
pounds of weight. High enough to stand up in, it 
had a gauze window in the rear wall, with a flap to 
it which could be guyed out in fine weather and closed 
in when it stormed ; it had a netting front door over 
a sill a foot high, and the cover flap of the front 
door was V-shaped, so that it formed a porch when 
held out horizontally by two upright poles, making 
a shady place to sit under and one sheltered from 
rain for a cooking space when needed. 

The boys piled spruce and fir browse on the floor 
of their tent, sealing up its sod cloth, rolled out their 
sleeping bags, and hung wall pockets at the head of 
each bed to hold all their small camp belongings. 
Then they went out to inspect the Colonel’s bivouac. 
Near their own tent it was, a classic of comfort and 
lightness for one lone hiker. A stretcher bed hung 
on two stout poles, which were lashed to a pair of 
170 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


shears about a foot above the soil, and over the 
shears ran a ridge rope, with the tarp thrown over it 
and pegged down behind to form a windbreak. Its 
front edge was guyed out in a gentle slant, so that 
the Colonel had a cooking space in front of his bed, 
in out of the rain; and he could sit on the bed and 
tend his meal or clean his rifle, or just loaf or lie at 
ease on it. As the boys approached he was filling the 
bottom of the stretcher bed with fine fir browse. 

“Learned that trick in the Army, long ago, boys. 
The Service camp cot is the coldest thing to sleep on 
ever devised by the brain of man, — unless you put a 
layer of hay or browse in the bottom of it. Then it 
is good, and comfortable and warm.” 

He rolled out his canvas bed roll on it and lay 
down, to dream indolently in the sunny, pine-scented 
glade, while through a rift in the foliage his eyes 
drank in the hazy, purple splendor of the Canyon. 
“This is good enough, for the present, boys,” he 
grunted, stretching his arms in lazy happiness. “I 
haven’t any idea when we’ll ever bother to leave here 
again, but to-morrow we’ll hang up a deer and try 
to get the dogs on a cougar.” 

Sid and Scotty wandered on to inspect the rest 
of the camp. The tinkle of horse bells came from a 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


little mountain meadow where their ponies had been 
turned out. Up near them a gray and black pat- 
terned blanket, hanging in a tree, told where Niltci 
had staked out his claim for sleeping quarters. 
Under a nest of big pines lay Big John’s bed roll on 
a thick bank of needles. Down near a tiny spring 
in the ravine, that facetious child of Montana was at 
work making a stone fireplace, and already he had a 
saddle and horse gear rack built to keep their leather 
above the rodent zone. 

It was all good ; too good to be true ; too wild and 
beautiful and sublime, and filled to the brim with 
Nature’s plenty for any but very honest men to live 
there at all, thought Sid. A healthy, natural lassi- 
tude had come over the boys. Nature gives these 
periods, when she is in her mild and genial moods, 
for times of recuperation to her children. They are 
not wise who waste them, unheeding. Sid and Scotty 
sauntered down the ravine and then climbed a tall, 
round pinnacle of yellow rock, invited by the mists 
of immense distance that lay beyond it. On its brink 
they lay down, beside a stunted pinyon that had 
found a lodgment there. Below and before them 
stretched the vast gulf of the canyon, clear to its 
south rim twelve miles away. They had no wish to 
172 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


do anything but lie there and look. There are spec- 
tacles of Nature that man never tires of dreaming 
over, like the ocean and its ever-tumbling surf. This 
canyon is one of them. For a long time neither 
youth said a word. 

“IPs just the Canyon, yet,” said Sid, at length. 
“Wait till we get down into it — then we’ll begin to 
appreciate it !” 

Early next morning Sid and Scotty turned out re- 
freshed and ready to perform prodigies. The horses 
were saddled and the dogs unchained. Off through a 
high table-land of tall pines the horses galloped, with 
Ruler and the pups all over the timber, running in 
wide casts around the main course of the cavalcade. 
Down into the shallow gulches and across wooded 
promontories leaped and sprang the ponies. These 
ravines were the gentlest beginnings of that vast 
shore line which once rimmed the course of the Colo- 
rado. Each gulch sloped downward, to fade in long 
wooded ravines into the blue depths below. Always 
the great physical fact of the Canyon was there. 
You couldn’t get away from it, couldn’t forget it for 
a moment. 

Then Ruler gave tongue. It was a musical bel- 
low, a houndy song that told the world he had found 
i73 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


something. The pups dashed over at his call. Big 
John, on the fast, white mustang, clattered over and 
dismounted in a single leap. Ruler was already un- 
raveling the trail, his long, ropy tail swinging in cir- 
cles as he snuffed along, yelping at intervals as he 
ran. The party gathered around the track, while 
Niltci bent down with his face almost in it. A faint 
impression was there, in the leaves, large and round, 
but without any particular formation. 

“Cougar. Beeg!” pronounced the Navaho boy 
after a careful examination. 

“I told you they was lion-broke !” exulted Big 
John. “Them runs we had after the Black Panther 
spiled ’em for small stuff, — Ruler’s broke, anyway.” 

A ringing, resounding chime of hound voices rang 
up from the depths of the ravine below. All four of 
them were in that chorus, even Lee who was proving 
backward and slow in his development. 

“Ride, boys! They’ve started him!” whooped 
Colonel Colvin, vaulting into his saddle. He thun- 
dered off down the ravine, with Sid and Niltci hard 
after him. 

Big John headed his horse up across the slope. 
“Come on, son!” he called to Scotty. “We’ll ooze 
for a point an’ watch which way the varmint goes. 
174 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


He mought turn an’ come back up, an’ he’d git away 
if no one was up here.” 

Immediately they topped the slope, the white mus- 
tang began to race off through the dense young tim- 
ber that covered the promontory. Scotty drove in 
his spurs and hung low over his saddle, guarding his 
eyes from the slap of branches. It took some riding 
to keep up with Big John ! After a time the ground 
pitched down dizzily. Through the trees Scotty got 
glimpses of the purple void out there, and above him 
rose the long lines of pinnacles of yellow buttes. 
Far down below he could hear the constant chiming 
of the hounds. The chase was crossing their front. 
Then the trees grew suddenly sparse and short be- 
low them, and Big John reined the white mustang 
sharply up on his haunches where he slid with all 
four hoofs braced in the crumbly soil. 

It was awful, on ahead ! The land seemed to end 
nowhere, with unheard-of voids below. Looking up, 
Scotty could see the yellow cliffs frowning high 
above him, now, while the clayey rock they were 
standing in was reddish. 

“Right yere’s whar we ties up and takes to shank’s 
mare!” said Big John, dismounting, tethering his 
mustang to a stout sapling and taking off his lariat 
i75 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


coil. Scotty followed suit, wondering how they were 
ever going to get up again. And then a queer shiver 
of realization burst upon him. This red rock was 
only the next below the top of all those long bars of 
color that line the infinite slopes of the Grand Can- 
yon! 

They slid down to the brink of the ledge and 
looked over. A great slope, acres in area and cov- 
ered with sparse timber, appeared below. Ruler was 
streaking down through it, volleying his approval of 
the trail. Almost vertically below Scotty was Pep- 
per’s sturdy back, the hound hesitating over the pas- 
sage of some shelf below him. Bourbon and Lee 
were far up the slope, while the small figures of the 
Colonel, Sid and the Navaho could be seen far above 
to the left, sliding down a high roof of yellow clay. 

A sheer fall of two hundred feet lay directly in 
front of them. It seemed nothing at all in this abyss 
of infinite distances. Big John ran along the brink 
of it, dislodging stones which shot out, to hit the 
slope below after a tense interval of fall, and then 
go bounding on down to disappear from sight over 
the brink of shelves that led on down to yet lower 
depths. Scotty worked after him, somewhat more 
cautiously, but with none of the respect that he would 
1 76 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


have had for such a precipice as this anywhere else. 
His sense of proportion was utterly lost here. 

A crumbled comer of the shelf gave them a steep 
slide, down which without a second’s hesitation Big 
John plunged. Whizz! Ankle-deep in red earth, 
accompanied by a cloud of big and little stones, he 
shot down the slope. Scotty followed, giving him- 
self no time to let his imagination work. They tore 
on after the hounds, through thick, bushy pines and 
spruces that covered the slope. Without any warn- 
ing at all, save the interminable blue distance ahead, 
it suddenly ended in another frightful precipice. 
Scotty brought up on the brink of it, hugging a sap- 
ling and glad to see that for once Big John had 
stopped. 

Over to the right the trees trailed down to a point, 
terminated by a tall red cliff, craggy-faced, indented 
with great slabs and bowlders, which threw huge 
shadows of themselves on the next cliff beyond. A 
sort of chasm or chimney led down its side, a mighty 
cleft full of bowlders in which all the skyscrapers 
in the world could be piled and never be found. 
Down this impossible, preposterous thing the dogs 
were climbing, as their voices proclaimed. 

Scotty looked up. Already the entire world 
177 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


seemed to have been stood up on end above him. 
The green pines and yellow pinnacles of the rim 
above looked like a line of mere dents in it, with 
a little dark moss covering their tops. It would be 
days and days of work getting up there again ! But 
Big John had only paused to get the location of the 
dogs in mind before he set off again along that preci- 
pice wall. Scotty followed. He might as well be 
killed sticking close to Big John as be killed anyhow, 
by some fall which could only end up in the Colorado 
itself, perhaps half a mile yet below him in a verti- 
cal line ! 

Ruler had charged out of the bottom of the chim- 
ney, barking a regular hullabaloo of a treeing call. 
If the dogs had slid down this cleft, men could climb 
down it, the boy reasoned as he began descending an 
almost perpendicular chimney, hanging to small, stout 
pines and catching his toes in crevices in the rock. 
They came upon Lee, whining piteously, afraid of 
being left behind, afraid to make the jump that 
would land in a sort of chute already worn with dog 
and cougar tracks where the others had gone down. 
Big John picked him up unceremoniously and tossed 
him into the chute, where he sprawled and slid with 
lightning speed down to the slope below. Without 
i78 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


a word the man climbed bn down after him, with 
Scotty panting and laboring behind. 

Once on the slope below a columnar yellow pine 
loomed up far down the slide. It had survived ava- 
lanches, rock slides, ice rifts — was Nature’s survival 
of the fittest, to seed the slopes beneath it and below 
it. Upon one of its branches the tawny body of the 
cougar crouched, treed, spitting at the dogs prancing 
below, twitching his tail angrily, ready to spring on 
the instant. 

“Shoot, you little wart — if you miss I’ll pisen yore 
grub!” barked Big John at Scotty, holding his own 
rifle at the ready. Scotty braced himself and poised 
the heavy .405. He had always prided himself on 
his shooting, but never in any such condition as 
this. His whole body shook with fatigue; he was 
covered with a scalding perspiration. Hold as he 
might, the bead refused to steady. Its square white 
patch nearly covered the cougar at that range, yet it 
could not have been over two hundred yards. Scotty 
finally attempted trigger release on the swing. The 
rifle went off, driving his shoulder back a foot with 
its recoil and, as they watched, a huge spall of bark 
flew out of the tree trunk above the cougar’s back. 
Instantly he sprang down among the yelping dogs. 
179 


THE BLACK PANTHER 

A whirlwind of unbelievably swift action ensued. 
Yellow and brown were inextricably mixed as the 
cougar struck this way and that, the dogs darting in 
from every angle, the cat turning to strike as each 
grabbed a new hold. Big John raced forward, his 
rifle at shoulder, ready to put in a shot at the first 
possible instant. 

Then the cougar made a sidewise swipe of his 
paw, so swift that the eye could not follow it. The 
steel hooks of his claws caught in Ruler’s ear and 
the cat pulled him towards a snarling open mouth, 
towards the glistening white fangs that awaited him. 
But with a furious tug the dog tore himself loose, 
his ear slitting to ribbons. Big John fired at that 
tense instant when dog and cougar were braced in 
the fixed rigidity of their tug of war. The cat 
leaped in the air, high above the whole mob of dogs, 
landed running, and darted like a squirrel over the 
brink of the ledge. 

The dogs tore after him. Big John and Scotty 
raced down the slope in giant strides, that for Scotty 
kept getting longer and longer as his momentum 
gained. He finally threw himself sideways to the 
ground as he felt himself falling downhill rather 
than running. 

180 


SILENT PINES AND YELLOW CRAGS 


“Thar he is! — Mark left!” rasped Big John 
hoarsely, pointing below. The ledge was a mere es- 
carpment, and along its base the cougar was flying, 
his tail erect and bushy like a scared household tabby. 
Pepper clung like a viper to his hock, while Ruler 
was trying to forge ahead and get a throat hold. 
Then the cat disappeared into a rock crevice taking 
the dogs with him. 

Putting in their last burst of speed, Scotty and 
Big John threw themselves over to it. The huge 
rocky knife-edge that made the cleft, stuck up like 
a fan, — one of those little insignificant spalls on the 
cliff faces, as seen from El Tovar. Here it was 
enormous, and led down to no one knew where. A 
hoarse, snarling murmur and the worrying and fight- 
ing of dogs came up from inside it. 

“Run down to the lower edge, Scotty!” yelled 
Big John. “Fll drop a rock in here an’ he’ll come 
out to you like a bat out of hades.” 

Scotty slid down, arriving torn and bruised at the 
lower edge of the crack where the rock fan sprang 
up ten feet thick from the cliff. The narrow crack 
between it and the wall was dark as a pocket ; noth- 
ing came from there but the maddening roars of 
Ruler and the snarling of the cat. Then Big John 
181 


THE BLACK PANTHER 

whooped, above, and the crash of a falling rock re- 
sounded. Out of the rift, straight at Scotty the 
cougar exploded in a frightful cat-spit. His rear was 
covered with dogs, but his chest showed clear and 
tawny as he sprang. Scotty met him with the heavy 
.405, himself knocked flat against the cliff with its 
recoil. A reeking mass of animals shot past him in 
a fury of flying paws, rolled over and over down the 
slope, and fetched up in a writhing heap in the midst 
of a nest of scraggy pinyons. 

“Did you git him? ,, yelled Big John’s voice from 
above. 

“You bet!” crowed Scotty. “Come on down and 
help me with the dogs.” 

There was a rumble of falling stones and Big John 
dropped down beside him. 

“I knowed one good poak from thet ole cannon 
of the Doc’s would fotch him,” he laughed. “Good 
shootin’, son! Git some clubs, now, an’ we’ll gentle 
them pesky dawgs.” 

They needed to, — for a glorious dog-fight was in 
full swing over the dead body of the cougar. 


CHAPTER IX 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 

“TTYS got to turn back, Sid,” gasped Colonel 
I Colvin, as they halted at the foot of the vast 
slope that topped the second rim of the can- 
yon like a house roof. “Climbing up out of here is 
a job for a young heart ; mine would need half-soling 
before we’d ever make the rim again!” 

From safety holds on tough pinyons that over- 
hung the precipice of the second rim, they peered 
down at the chase far below. This second rim was 
an ungodly wall, perhaps a thousand feet sheer, and 
it no doubt cut a noticeable figure as viewed from 
El Tovar, where tourists at that moment were raving 
in absurd sentimentalities over the canyon. To the 
Colonel it meant a terminus, for him, of that par- 
ticular cougar chase, for to add its weight to the 
183 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


labors already in store on the climb back would be 
foolhardy to one of his age. They watched the tiny 
black dots weaving slowly across the lower slope, 
that must have been the dogs in hot chase of the 
cougar, and after them came two oval specks that 
were Scotty and Big John as viewed perpendicularly 
from their height. Then the whole business disap- 
peared over a ledge and nothing but the baying of 
invisible hounds came floating up from the far 
depths. 

Colonel Colvin shook his head. “IPs their meat, 
Sid. But there’s room enough in this country for 
two or three hunts to be going at the same time. 
They’ve got the dogs, but we’ve got Niltci, who’s 
better than a dog at forest hunting, I’ll warrant. 
We’ll climb back to the rim and start something of 
our own back in the breaks.” 

Sid felt that his place was with his father, any- 
way, and he did not care much about being a tail- 
ender in a hunt that had already distanced them. 

“Shrewd guess of Big John’s that was, Dad,” he 
replied. “It cut off at least half a mile for them. 
If the cat had gone north, along under the first rim 
wall, they’d have been out of it instead of us. Let’s 
ride back into the gulches and box canyons of the 
184 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


country behind the rim, and see what we can 
see.” 

They looked up, seeking a place to climb back. 
A thousand feet above them towered the rim of rock, 
dented with columnar pinnacles, crowned with 
dwarfed pines that they knew were themselves at 
least a hundred feet high. The Colonel was winded 
and panting before they had climbed for fifteen 
minutes. The crumbly soil slid down underfoot; 
even zigzagging was slow and laborious toil, — not at 
all eased by ledge after ledge of rock outcroppings 
that called for hands, knees and feet to scramble up 
them. Niltci and Sid pulled and pushed the Colonel 
up, but an hour of dizzy, sweating work had gone 
by and all were spitting cotton before they stood at 
the base of the rim rock precipice. 

Five hundred feet sheer it rose above them. For 
comparison Sid imagined that if he were looking up 
the Wool worth building to its very top and if, at the 
same time, he were standing on a narrow shelf of 
yellow and rotten rock with a slope three times as 
deep below, ending in blue nothingness — he would 
have some of the sensations that now overcame him 
as he looked up for some possible chimney up which 
to climb and wondered how they were ever going to 
185 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


get his father up it if they did find one. If he could 
only manage to stand off from this thing a little, so 
as to get some idea of its surface, it would be easy to 
find the break in the rim where they had come down. 
Which way did it lie, north or south? They dis- 
cussed it, finally yielding to Niltci, who was sure that 
it lay north. 

Along under the rim wall they crept. The nar- 
row path was worn deep with cougar tracks. It was 
a regular runway for them, for they lived down here 
in the canyon and came over the rim at night to 
hunt in the deer and wild horse country of the hin- 
terland. At any point they might come upon a cou- 
gar cave, here, and the Colonel, who was in advance, 
never passed around a pinnacle base without stepping 
warily, with his rifle poised for instant use. 

“By George, Niltci, you’re wrong — we should 
have turned south!” barked out Sid after perhaps 
half an hour of this gingerly progress. “Look at 
these young Matterhoms coming up out of the can- 
yon below us ! I never noticed them before !” 

The party stopped to take bearings. Certainly 
the lookout was new and unfamiliar. The canyon 
jutted out here in a great cape, and on its slope 
1 86 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


Nature had dropped, casually, three or four red and 
yellow mountains that rose below like pyramids. 
Anywhere else they would be objects of wonder and 
bear grandiloquent names. 

But Niltci shook his head vigorously and led on 
without a word. The rim cliff ended abruptly a lit- 
tle further on in a huge tower of stone, and, round- 
ing it, they found themselves in a vast amphitheater, 
a mile deep, and a mile across a valley of illimitable 
depths to its opposite point. All around it the cliffs 
rose sheer. Surely they never came down here! 
Niltci had to acknowledge that much, himself, but 
instead of turning back to retrace their steps he 
grunted impetuously and led them on, following the 
rim into that enormous basin. 

“Aw, rats ! — what’s the use, Niltci, you’re crazy !” 
exploded Sid, as both he and the Colonel balked at 
going any further. For answer the Indian boy 
pointed to a thin fissure that cleft the rim from top 
nearly to bottom, up near the head of the basin. It 
was about half a mile away. How Niltci could know 
that that crevice could be practicable for ascent, Sid 
could not conjecture, but the red men were wise in 
the ways of Nature, so he followed on, albeit incredu- 
lously. But he had no idea what impassable obstacle 
187 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


might await them to the south if they turned back. 
This, at least, looked possible ! 

Arrived at it, they peered up to where the last of 
it ended in a broken, jagged path, showing where 
water had come down during the rains. For fifty 
feet this rose up the cliff, — an absurd trail for any- 
thing but a fly to attempt ; then began the in-cutting 
of the fissure. 

Niltci started up it, amid a howl of protest from 
Sid and the Colonel. Like a creeping cat the Indian 
lad climbed steadily up until he had reached the fis- 
sure, where he turned with a whoop of triumph. 

“Wow! We can't let him get away with that, 
Father!" chuckled Sid. “Shut your eyes and climb! 
Forget mother, forget your insurance, and all the 
rest of it — it's the only way! — I'll be right behind 
you." 

The Colonel groaned, whimsically, and started up. 
Niltci came down again by some incredible feat of 
legerdemain — as they looked back upon that climb 
afterwards — and gave him a strong lift over the 
worst places, and so they all reached the bottom of 
the fissure. It was dark and gloomy, and it curved 
around a bend above, so that they had no idea how 
it was all going to turn out — most likely in some 
188 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


sheer wall, thought Sid. But the only way to get 
over these things was to go ahead and do them, so 
they climbed up into it. Part of the time Niltci was 
straddling both walls of it; part of the climb crawl- 
ing up vertical ledges higher than his head. The 
curve mercifully hid from them the frightful depths 
below, should anyone fall. It grew better, once 
around it, cutting deeper and deeper into the rim wall 
and becoming less and less vertical. Masses of pine 
roots fringed it overhead, and finally their feet found 
a narrow bottom of yellow, crumbled rocks, which 
led up in a steep slant to the forest above. 

“Great work, Niltci ! That’s mountaineering for 
you!” laughed the Colonel as they dropped panting 
on the forest duff. “I suppose you could visualize 
this whole water crack, having once seen the fissure 
in the rim wall, eh ?” 

Niltci grunted happily. He had no idea what that 
speech was all about, but evidently his adored Lord 
Colonel was pleased ! Sid rejoined them, a moment 
later, and all sat and looked ruefully at their cloth- 
ing. Their bleeding knees peeped through frayed 
and torn riding breeches, their buckskin gloves were 
out at the fingers; Sid had a scraped thigh, caked 
with blood; all the uppers of their cruiser moccasins 
189 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


gapped open in rent seams. Niltci, in his light cot- 
tons and buckskin leggings, seemed the least frazzled 
of the three, but his bare toes poked out from thin 
moccasins worn through on the rocks. It was half 
an hour before the Colonel sat up again. 

“And now, where are we?” he queried, briskly. 
“We’ve got all the rest of the day, so we’ll find 
the horses and go hang up a buck for camp 
meat.” 

They all rose and started off through the forest. 
A short walk through the high pines that covered 
the plateau brought the blue haze beyond, of the 
canyon again, and presently they came out on a 
rock pinnacle that commanded the whole prospect 
below. A sheer fall about a thousand feet lay below 
them. Beyond that smoky, purple depths showed 
beyond over the second rim. 

“The place where we came down must lie to the 
west of here, boys,” declared the Colonel. “Big 
John and Scotty are somewhere down in this valley 
— they’ll be all day getting back! We’ll start west 
for another look-see.” 

A second outlook from another point showed them 
the steep slope down which they had first come. 
Up in the ravine at the head of it would be the 


ioo 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


horses, for there they had first started the cougar. 
Soon they were in it and had remounted. 

“Sore and tattered, but still in the game!” ejacu- 
lated the Colonel as he put spurs to the roan and led 
back up the ravine into the hinterland. 

Back in here they found the huge flanks of Buck- 
skin all cut up with rocky glades grown up with yel- 
low pines, and gulches which led to high, walled 
canyons, all leading out to a discharge into the Grand 
Canyon, somewhere. Great pines grew heavily in 
the swales. It was a wonderful, rich, plentiful game 
country! Again and again Niltci grunted, to point 
down at deer tracks, wolf tracks, and the round hoof- 
prints of wild horses, and there seemed to be a 
cougar after every deer, judging from their fre- 
quent footprints! 

“Hist!” called the Colonel, suddenly, stooping 
down to whip out his .35 from its scabbard. The 
bushes shook, up in a densely grown ravine that lost 
itself somewhere in the upper flanks of the moun- 
tain. Gray shapes bounded across it, stiff-legged, 
flashing into sight occasionally, to disappear as 
quickly. 

The Coloners rifle barked, followed by Sid’s. One 
of the gray shapes plunged, and there was a mad 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


scramble in the timber. They were mule deer, a 
whole drove of them ! Sid fired at another, running 
bewilderedly up a bush-strewn slope in full flight. 
Then all was still again. 

“I nailed mine,” said the Colonel. “We’ll wait 
a while. Once he lies down he’ll never get up. — 
Lord, boys, there must have been thirty in that 
drove !” 

He got out his pipe and lit it, while the horses 
switched flies patiently. Then Niltci, who had been 
scouting through the bush, called to them with a low 
grunt of eagerness. There seemed to be suppressed 
excitement in it, too, and the tones of his voice 
thrilled Sid with a nameless feeling as he urged his 
horse over to where Niltci stood, pointing down at 
the track. 

“Come over here, Father — for the love of Pete, 
look!” called Sid, tingling with shivery sensations 
as he looked down from his horse at a deep hollow in 
the needles, over which Niltci still stood, his wild 
eyes snapping meaningly. 

The Colonel came over and halted his horse. The 
track looked as if someone had set down a long oval 
bowl there. It was all of fourteen inches long, and 
the foot that made it had borne down so heavily that 
192 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


a trilobed palm and the five toeprints, huddled to- 
gether like a human foot, were distinctly visible. 
And such toes ! Each one was the size of two human 
thumbs laid down together ! Some distance beyond 
each was a long, pointed gash in the soil at least five 
inches from base to tip, the claw marks, all heading 
together. 

"Good Lord ! That's more than a grizzly, Sid !” 
ejaculated the Colonel after studying it awhile. "I 
tell you what ! — in the old days we used to have the 
giant yellow grizzly of California, a whale of a 
brute. He’d carry off a whole horse, and many’s the 
cowman who has been suddenly charged by one from 
ambush. The old boy wanted the horse, but he 
didn’t mind fetching its rider a swipe, incidentally, 
that knocked him into kingdom come. A .45-90, — 
even the old Sharps .45-105 with the 550-grain bul- 
let — never fazed him. That tribe of grizzlies has 
been extinct since the early ’90’s in California, boys, 
but I’ll miss my guess if here isn’t one! First track 
like this I’ve seen in thirty years. Here, if any- 
where, there’d be a few survivors. He’s my meat, 
Sid ! You got old Ring-Neck, up in Montana ; this 
bird is mine!” declared the old Indian fighter, his 
eyes flashing. "How old is that track, Niltci ?” 

193 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


The Indian boy knelt down and smelled it for 
some time. Then he raised his head and held up one 
finger. 

“One day, eh? It’s a good thing we got two 
bucks, Sid. We’ll get one of them out of here for 
camp meat and leave the other for bait.” 

Niltci pointed silently into the bush ahead of him. 
Here was another deep footprint, and, sighting along 
it, a dim line of them led up the ravine flank. They 
followed slowly on the horses, who were shivering 
and plunging violently, for even up to their nostrils 
had come that faint grizzly odor that a horse fears 
above all other things. Up on the ridge the track 
crossed bare rock, and on a little sandy spot a huge 
track lay, a beautiful print, like an enormous, flat, 
stubby hand with long, sharp, in-pointing nails for 
fingers. Beyond the ridge lay a hideous gulch, a 
bad-land, all bowlders and scraggly pinyons, twist- 
ing and writhing among the rocks in weird con- 
tortions. It would invite a broken foreleg to attempt 
to work the horses in there. 

“No use following him any further,” said Colonel 
Colvin as they reined up to look it over. “We’d only 
leave our own scent around, — though I doubt if he’d 
care any ! We’ll go get the bucks.” 

194 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


They retraced their way and went up on the hill. 
The Colonel’s buck lay some fifty feet from where 
he had been hit, his double-Y antlers and black 
crown proclaiming him a mule deer. Sid’s lay fur- 
ther up in the bush and was a mere spikehorn. 

“He’ll do fine for camp meat, though. Get him 
up, Sid; we’ll paunch him somewhere away from 
here. The old yellow grizzly may clear out, if 
there’s too much human sign around, but still, 
mighty few people ever hunt this country and he may 
have that bad temper of the old-timers.” 

He halted his horse and looked over the scene, 
planning where to locate his ambush and the prob- 
able course of the charge and battle that would surely 
ensue if the first shot from the .35 did not prove 
mortal. Sid and Niltci got up the buck and tied its 
legs to the saddle thongs. Then they all rode back 
to camp, silent, subdued, thinking over that twilight 
vigil of the Colonel’s by the bait, to come. 

After rustling a meal, all three went out to the 
rim rock to await the return of Scotty and Big John. 
It was nearly sunset before they heard voices below, 
and then Big John’s sombrero — what was left of it 
— appeared over the rim. His face was caked with 
dirt, bloody, and streaked with sweat lines. 

195 


% 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


“Shore I ain’t got enough clothes left on me to 
flag a tote-train!” he grinned, spitting the dust out 
of a grimy mouth as he turned to haul on a bundle 
below him. “Hyar’s yore cat skin — I needs another 
skin myself, b’gosh ! Anyone which same wants a 
kitty out’n that canyon kin go an’ get him, an’ keep 
right on goin’! — Thar !” — he gave the rope a final 
haul and sat down on the brim with a mighty 
“Whoosh!” of relief. 

Scotty came up, pushing behind the bundle. He 
hadn’t a word, but an unconquerable grin beamed 
out of his eyes. He flopped down on the needles, 
and after him struggled Ruler, to lie down with his 
long, red tongue hanging out and his sides panting. 
Pepper crawled over the rim in his wake and curled 
up in a doggy heap of legs and ears, licking morosely 
at various red wounds that gashed his sides and 
thighs. The other two pups were yelping disconso- 
lately at the foot of the slide and Sid and Niltci 
sprang down to carry them up. 

“Whoosh ! That was reg’lar Bronx Park huntin’, 
I’ll say!” exclaimed Big John, yawning, with a 
mighty stretch of his arms. “Where in thunder was 
you-all? Scotty, here, got him.” 

Sid grinned as he looked over the ragged assem- 
196 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


bly. Scotty was a sight ! He was covered with yel- 
low dirt from head to foot; his breeches were split 
wide open and a jagged red cut showed on his thigh. 
Big John’s knees were bloody, with the fringes of 
his home-spuns encircling them like whiskers. Ruler 
licked steadily at a great red tear on his thigh where 
the skin hung open like a small hairy tent flap, and 
shook his ears continually as they dripped blood from 
long slits in them. 

“Father couldn’t make it, boys,” he explained. 
“It takes a heart like a hunk of sole leather to at- 
tempt the canyon. He was wise to stay out. We 
turned back at the first rim, when you fellows and 
the dogs went over the second. We’ve got a buck 
hanging up in camp.” 

“Roast her whole, boys, — I could eat a rhinoc’ros 
raw!” gaped Big John. “We’ve been climbin’ since 
ten o’clock ’smornin’. Lucky I thought to take my 
rope down with me. We had to haul them dawgs 
up the chutes, one at a time.” 

Sid and Niltci picked up the cougar skin and the 
whole party started for camp. An hour later a 
monumental mulligan, compounded of cougar 
chunks, spuds, onions, peas, tomatoes and macaroni, 
boiled in an eight-quart pail, was served. Big John 
197 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


and Scotty were still prodding into the bottom of it 
with their spoons when Sid and Niltci sat back 
utterly stuffed. The Colonel had long since departed 
for his lonely vigil near the buck carcass, awaiting 
the coming of the Yellow Grizzly. 

They stretched out the cougar skin and measured 
it — nine feet two inches, with three feet six of tail 
— but could get nothing but uninterested grunts from 
those two, who still scooped in the mulligan pail for 
more. Then Scotty and Big John rolled over with- 
out a further word and fell sound asleep where they 
lay. 

It was broad daylight when Sid awoke again, and 
the sun must have been ten o’clock high. The Colo- 
nel had not returned. Scotty and Big John slept 
heavily, for Nature had a lot of fixing up to do on 
them yet. Niltci was gone. Sid hoped that he had 
tracked his father to the rocky gulch, for he felt 
mighty uneasy about that great yellow bear of the 
fourteen-inch track, with only a lone hunter to face 
him. All he had ever read about the California Sil- 
ver Tip came to mind. The largest one ever meas- 
ured weighed 1,150 pounds and was nine feet from 
nose to tail and over ten feet across the fore paws. 
That was as large as any Alaska brown bear, yet 
198 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


with the ferociousness and agility of the grizzly to 
back all that weight and strength. The Black 
Panther would be a mere kitten compared to this 
brute ! The average Bengal tiger weighed 340 
pounds and would go something over eleven feet; 
the largest cougar was under three hundred pounds. 
Even the Black Panther would not reach over three 
hundred, judging from the skin of the cat Scotty 
had killed. The Yellow Grizzly was three times as 
big as any of them, and quite as active and ferocious. 
He doubted whether the .35 was rifle enough to 
stop him. 

Sid had about decided to take Scotty's .405 and 
try to ride to the gulch to see what had happened, 
when he looked up, to see a Navaho Indian standing 
silently before him. The man’s face looked somehow 
familiar. Sid thought he recognized him as one of 
the bucks at the Fire Dance, as the red man held out 
a grimy envelope and proffered it with a bronzed 
and friendly smile. 

Sid tore it open, although it was addressed to 
Colonel Colvin. 

“Dear Colonel [it read] : 

“All halleluiah has broken loose in wagon loads, 
here. I hate to send for the Agent, and perhaps get 
199 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


out a troop of soldiers, but I’ll have to do it if it 
gets much worse. The Indians have spirited old 
Neyani off somewhere, and I reckon they’ll make a 
sacrifice of him to appease Dsilyi in spite of all I 
can do for him. I found a wild story about the 
Black Panther having taken Niltci, the boy, when I 
got here. You had left for the Canyon, but the 
Panther came back only a few nights later and took 
another sheep from Neyani ’s corral. You can under- 
stand how the Indians took that! They wanted to 
wipe out Neyani’s whole family. If I had dogs I’d 
track that confounded cougar and do away with him, 
somehow, but I can’t lay for him and shoot him here 
or my influence over these redskins would be gone 
forever. If you can break your hunt to come over 
here with the dogs I would be eternally grateful. 
Meet me in Canyon Cheyo, near the mouth of Monu- 
ment Canyon, which is a good landmark. I’ll be 
there, and we’ll put something over on this supersti- 
tious bunch of redskins. I declare, I lose all patience 
with them sometimes ! 

“Yours in haste, 

“J. F. Hinchman, Maj. U. S. A. Ret’d.” 

Sid made up his mind at once. It was necessary 
to get rid of the Indian runner, first, so that their 
movements could be made unwatched by the Navaho. 
He went to his tent and tore a fly leaf out of a small 


200 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


leather notebook in his tent wall pocket. He wrote 
a brief message that they were coming, rolled it 
small, and slipped it into an empty rifle cartridge. 
Corking it with a bit of pine, he returned to hand 
it to the runner. 

“You take, White Father Hindi,” he ordered. 
“Pronto! Savvy? You got meat and oats?” 

The Indian shook his head, pointing to the small 
bag of meal at his loin cloth. Sid cut him a flank 
from the buck, gave him a bag of oats and a hand- 
ful of cartridges for a present, and sent him on his 
way. Then he saddled Pinto and rode toward the 
gulch, leaving Scotty and Big John still snoring in 
camp. 

He rode along the flanks of Buckskin, trying hard 
to remember the lay of the ravines, even though he 
had passed through them twice before. It was not 
easy. Several times he was sure he was lost, but 
each time some familiar tree or rock formation re- 
assured him and he rode on. When he finally 
reached their ravine he was not sure of it, even then. 
Scraggly pinyons covered its rocky slopes, but there 
were dozens of others just like it, and there was 
absolutely nothing living to be seen in it. But, as 
for men or animals, what are they in Nature’s vast 


201 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


landscapes, where half a mile of verdure is tilted up 
as a mere wrinkle in one of her mountains ! Buck- 
skin was twenty miles long, a straight knife-edge as 
seen from across the canyon, cloud-covered, dim, and 
distant, as inaccessible to the traveling world as the 
North Pole, and it had hundreds of ravines like 
this. 

Sid halted his pony, looking down into the ravine 
with half a mind to push on further. Then a sort 
of break in the pinyons attracted his eye. That was 
not natural ; something lay there ! He rode over to 
it, and long before he reached it a great brown mass 
of fur appeared dimly, huddled up in a mass of 
tough, craggy trees that had been broken off like 
jackstraws. He dismounted and walked over to it 
with rifle at ready, for by no urging would Pinto 
come a step nearer. The brown mass did not move 
as he climbed through the crags toward it. 

A shiver went through Sid. Why, this was the 
place the Colonel had chosen for his hide! It was 
a hundred yards from where the buck lay, down hill, 
there, on the ravine flank ! Then he got sight of the 
animal’s head. Big as a brown bowlder it was, 
with incurved snout-bone doubled up on a great 
beard of furry whiskers. The great round ears were 


202 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


erect, but the eyes were closed and a streak of blood 
ran from under long, glistening tushes still bared in 
the snarl of death. It was the Yellow Grizzly, Sid 
realized — but where was his father ! He stood look- 
ing over the carcass and peering about through the 
pinyons, fearfully. There were cakes of matted 
blood all over the long hair on the bear’s chest, and 
great cavities where the bullets had come out on the 
other side, and there in that side was a knife, still 
buried to the hilt — Niltci’s ! 

Sid looked around, bewildered. The pines were 
all torn and mangled about him. There had been a 
terrific fight, here ! 

Then a feebly cry electrified him. “Water!” it 
called, more a moan than an articulate voice. 

Sid rushed over. Down in a pit of bowlders he 
saw the brown khaki-clad back of a man, lying face 
downward doubled up on his side. Those broad 
shoulders could be none other than his father’s, the 
boy realized, as he scrambled toward the spot with 
sobs of anguish welling up in him. 

Gently he turned him over, and sat him up in a 
more comfortable position. Down the Colonel’s 
side, from his shoulder to knee, he saw a frightful 
row of red marks, as if some set of steel cultivator 


203 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


hooks had gouged its way there. The rocks around 
were all red, and the Colonel’s clothing was soaked 
and dripping. 

But the old warrior’s eyes opened and looked at 
him steadfastly as Sid slipped his arm tenderly be- 
hind his head, calling to him softly, the tears raining 
down his cheeks. He motioned for water. Sid 
nodded and raced to where he had tied Pinto. Rip- 
ping off the canteen from the saddle hook, he dashed 
back and held its life-giving stream to Colonel Col- 
vin’s lips. Then he set about bandaging his claw 
wounds. 

“Better now, Father?” asked Sid, tremulously, as 
he finished. 

The Colonel opened his eyes again. “Niltci!” he 
gasped, waving his arm feebly. “Don’t mind me — 
now.” 

Sid rested him back, comfortably, and set out in 
the direction the Colonel had indicated, searching the 
bowlders under the low pinyons. Fifty feet further 
on, he made out a white cotton shirt lying under the 
shade of a scraggy pine. One buckskinned leg was 
drawn up in the act of creeping; the other lay limp 
and was red with blood. 

“Gosh, — that boy would have crawled all the way 
204 


KAIBAB GRIZZLY 


to camp for help, if he hadn’t fainted!” exclaimed 
Sid, as he rushed to him with his canteen. “I need 
all kinds of help, here! It’s time I fired our sig- 
nal.” 

Niltci came to and grabbed at the canteen, his 
eyes speaking volumes as he drank. Sid looked 
around. A glint of blue steel caught his eye. It 
was the Colonel’s .35 — with its stock smashed off 
close behind the lever. Its magazine was empty, 
and he dared not move the Colonel again to take 
more cartridges from his belt. He ran over to the 
bear’s carcass, grabbed up his own Army .30, and 
raised it to the sky. 

“Bang! Bang! Bang! — Bang!” whipped out its 
sharp report. 




CHAPTER X 


THE DESERT’S FROWN 


“/^TOP him! — Nothing stopped him!” smiled 
the Colonel wanly from his bandages, as he 
eyed the huge skin of the Yellow Grizzly 
stretched between four poles and propped up where 
he could look at it and gloat over it. “Look at that 
skin — it's a regular sieve!” 

The boys and Big John sat against trees around 
the small camp fire in front of the Colonel's stretcher 
bed tent. It had been a strenuous two days. First 
there had been, for Sid, those anxious hours of wait- 
ing and signaling until at last Big John and Scotty 
had poked the noses of their ponies over the ridge. 
Then the long trail home, with two stretchers to 
carry, the bulk of which labor had fallen on Sid 
and Big John, while Scotty led the horses. And then 
206 


THE DESERT’S FROWN 


a feverish night in camp, when both patients needed 
sitting up with and constant attention. This sec- 
ond day had been spent in skinning out the grizzly 
by Big John and Scotty, and in assiduous doctoring 
and splint-making by Sid. And now, as sunset 
came, the huge pelt had been set up for the Colonel 
to look at, and Sid had decided to let him talk. 

“Yes, sir, that was the nearest I ever came to get- 
ting my everlasting!” went on the Colonel. “With 
just two inches more reach he’d have taken out 
every rib in my body. It was in the dim light before 
dawn, boys, that I made him out, standing over the 
body of the deer. He picked that buck up like a 
mouse and started lumbering off with it. That gave 
me only a rear quartering shot, which is the very 
one to make him most angry and do the least im- 
mediate damage. But it was that or none, so I drew 
careful bead and fired. 

“That started the fun, men!” said the Colonel, 
laughing feebly, after a pause to get his breath. 
“He whirled about and started for me in leaps that 
were twenty feet to the jump. It was the cursed 
wind that did it. You know how it whirls and howls 
around Buckskin! Never the same any two min- 
utes. Some one of those back currents sweeping 
207 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


down the mountain took my scent right to him. He 
didn’t want any better guide ! 

“I think I missed my second shot,” went on the 
Colonel, “for he was bounding up and down so over 
those bowlders, rearing and bellowing like an express 
tiain as he came. But my third bullet took him 
square between the eyes and doubled him up like the 
punch of a battering-ram. He went over in a com- 
plete somersault, Sid. Did he stay down? Any 
other creature in the world, even an African lion, 
would have been scuppered by that shot, but that 
mountain of beef got up and came right on, like a 
ton of hate. You know something of the ferocity 
of that grizzly charge, Sid, and you, too, Scotty! 

“The next shot was a heart shot and I was mighty 
careful of it, for I had only about forty yards 
left ” 

Big John nodded. “Shore ’twas a center shot, 
Colonel. That heart was shot to ribbons when I took 
her out. I seen whar the bullet went in, an’ got her 
out to see what ye done to him. Oughtta hev stopped 
him, right thar.” 

“Not for a minute! He squalled like a stuck pig, 
but hardly slackened. I fired my last bullet at fifteen 
208 


THE DESERT’S FROWN 


feet and then jumped back from the cleft in the 
bowlders where I was hidden. He cleared the dis- 
tance in one bound and I saw that big right paw of 
his coming down on me like the trunk of a tree. It 
smashed the rifle out of my hands. I felt like a hot 
iron had ripped me from top to bottom as his claws 
raked down inside my guard. I went over back- 
ward and then Niltci jumped in, from God knows 
where, and his knife flashed up and into the bear’s 
side. That’s the last thing I know about it, for I 
saw stars as my head struck the rocks.” 

“That blow knocked you about ten feet, Father, 
over the rock and into a little hollow' behind your 
hide,” said Sid. “As for Niltci, a back-hand swipe 
from the bear splintered his leg like a straw. There 
wasn’t a claw mark; on him. The old yellow boy 
must have collapsed where he lay, but he bit off and 
broke every pinyon tree in reach before he gave up. 
Some charge ! I’ll match him against any dangerous 
beast the world over. I’d like to see a bunch of 
Masai tackle him with spears, the way they do an 
African lion ! — There would be mighty few niggers 
left after he got through.” 

The Colonel looked blissfully at the great yellow 
expanse of fur, tipped with fine white at the end of 
209 


THE BLACK PANTHER 

«ach hair. “Boys, she’ll about cover the floor of the 
Den back home !” he exclaimed. “I’ve met a good 
many bears in my time, but our cavalry troop never 
got over into southern California, although we heard 
a good deal about those big demon grizzlies there. 
Even the modern .35 is not gun enough, I’ll say! 
The old buckskin pioneers must have had their hands 
full with them!” 

Sid now brought up the matter of Major Hinch- 
man’s letter, for it was essential to move quickly 
about that business. 

“The thing to do, as I see it, Father, is for Scotty 
and Big John and myself to take the dogs over there, 
right now. We know where the Black Panther 
hangs out, which the Major doesn’t. He and Big 
John can run him with the hounds, while Scotty and 
I climb up by the lariat into Lost Canyon and wait 
there until he comes. There must be a kiva or 
underground secret society cave somewhere in that 
pueblo. We’ll drop the carcass down there, so it 
will disappear forever. Then Major Hinchman can 
fix up some sort of a yarn that will take with the 
Indians, and the whole affair will blow over if the 
Black Panther don’t come any more. Niltci will be 
able to creep around and look after you and the 


210 


THE DESERT’S FROWN 


camp in a day or so, and there’s plenty of meat and 
provisions. We can get back in about a week.” 

The Colonel ruminated over it for some time. 
“Looks good, Sid. The less Niltci and I move 
around the better. I ought to be fairly well healed 
in a week, and the splints you put on the Indian boy 
will let him get about if you make him a pair of 
crutches. We’ll make out ! As for the Black Panther 
skin, it would be a wonderful trophy, but you 
couldn’t ship it out of Arizona without the game 
warden examining it, and then word of it would get 
back to the Indians. For Hinchman’s sake the only 
thing to do is to abolish it. Well — you might as well 
get organized for the trip, Sid.” 

He closed his eyes as if tired out with the effort. 
Sid and Scotty went to their tent, where lay Niltci. 
On being told that they were going to leave for a 
long trip, the Indian boy insisted on having a browse 
bed made for him under the Colonel’s shelter, where 
he could attend to him. A shy and childlike adora- 
tion for the old army officer seemed to have grown 
up in the Navaho lad; there was nothing he could 
do that would repay the debt he felt he owed the 
Colonel for saving him from the fanaticism of his 
own kinsfolk. This feeling he managed to convey 
21 1 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


in expressive sign language, accompanied by what 
few English words he knew. So, while Big John 
mended horse gear and got the outfits together, the 
boys spent the evening in making Niltci a pair of 
rude crutches and moving him out where he and 
the Colonel could run their own hospital together. 

Next morning the boys turned out, to find the 
Colonel and Big John talking earnestly in low tones 
together. Sid knew from their serious faces what 
they were discussing — water. The boys hovered 
around to listen, for both men were old desert cam- 
paigners and a long experience backed their words. 

“You can’t make time and take any of the pack 
animals, John,” the Colonel was saying. “Yet that 
water hole may be dry, or all green scum not fit to 
drink, at this time of the year. Ten gallons a day 
is the very least the horses can make out on. If you 
fill up at that tank you can push along and reach 
Canyon Cheyo by evening of the second day. I 
have only two water bags. Five gallons each. You’ll 
have to sling them to Scotty’s saddle bags, for he is 
the lightest. You can carry two quart canteens 
each, using all our spare ones. See that they are 
well-corked, for they will be half rations at the best. 


212 


THE DESERT’S FROWN 


No use striking for the San Juan. It is really as 
far up there as over the desert to Red Valley.” 

“You leave it to me, Colonel,” broke in Big John, 
emphatically. “I don’t want no pack horse totin’ 
water. I’ll rig them bags, an’ we’ll roll our freight 
outer here an’ squeeze the dem water out of that 
desert if we have to !” 

The boys made up their own rolls and saddle bags 
with a sense of the seriousness of their undertaking. 
To cross that desert without either packing or 
wagoning an ample supply of water was no joke. 
If all went well and they kept a good pace, they could 
make what water they could carry do. If stopped 
anywhere, any way, by a sandstorm, for instance — 
it made them thirsty just to think of it! 

As they filed out of camp Scotty rode the Colo- 
nel’s big roan, for he could easily carry the boy’s 
weight and the extra eighty pounds of water in the 
canvas bags. The rest of the party were loaded up 
with bags of oats in addition to their own outfits. 

At the ferry the old-timers shook their heads 
when the water bags and canteens were filled for their 
dash. It couldn’t be done — that was certain as 
death! But there was too much at stake to turn 
back. They alone could solve Major Hinchman’s 
213 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Indian troubles, and they weren’t going back on 
the Colonel’s old army chum, no matter what the 
risk. 

Once across the Colorado the horses cantered off 
briskly, snorting and whickering with good spirits. 
They had been filled up with all the water they could 
hold and it was yet early morning, keen and cool. 
The steep climb up the red buttes that led over the 
divide to the flat country north of the mesas began. 
Then came sand, valleys and valleys of it, with scant 
vegetation, dry, arid and desolate. That loose sand 
was particularly hard on the dogs. Lee had been 
left behind in camp, for he was too long-coupled to 
have the needful endurance, but Pepper and Bourbon, 
they had felt, would be worth taking. Ruler seemed 
made of iron, as he rambled right along through it. 
He evidently appreciated his responsibilities, for if 
either Pepper or Bourbon attempted to lag he was 
behind them with ready snarl and snapping teeth 
that drove them flying onward. At noon the party 
halted and doled out their first water. It worried the 
boys to see how greedily the horses sucked down 
their allotments of half a canvas pail each and then 
whickered and bit for more. The dogs nearly came 
to a fight over theirs, and each had to be held by his 
214 


THE DESERT’S FROWN 


collar to prevent him from flying at the drinking 
one. 

By evening the horses had slowed to an exasper- 
ating walk and the dogs limped painfully. Down 
into a hideous gulch Big John led the party. It was 
out of the wind, but dry as the Sahara. Here they 
made their first dry camp. The first water bag had 
gone flat and the second was already alarmingly 
lean. Sid shook his canteen. There was but a drop 
or two in the one on the off hook, and again he felt 
the cork of the other to make sure that it had not 
come out. He had gotten through the day on sched- 
ule. They were all right, provided 

That night he woke up with the cold. That was 
unusual, in itself, for that bag was good down to 
below freezing. Sid uncovered the flap and looked 
out. The stars were obscured, and a steady stinging 
sift, sift, sift of sand went on all around him. He 
could hear that faint, continuous hiss and ticking, 
and, attempting to move in his bag he was surprised 
to note it heavy as lead and immovable. 

“Sounds like the beginning of a sandstorm to me,” 
he murmured to himself. “Fd better wake John, so 
we can all turn out and look after the horses.” 

He crawled out of his bag and punched Big John 
215 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


awake. The keen wind blew steady and strong, 
chilling him to the bone, while blown sand gritted 
in his teeth. It did not take the big plainsman more 
than one sniff to bounce out of his mess of blankets, 
wide awake. 

‘‘Shore it’s a reg’lar night-bloomin’ swozzle 
a-comin’, Sid ! Let Scotty lie. We’ll git the hosses 
in under the shelter of the buttes.” 

Out in the cold gloom they found the animals, 
standing patiently with their sides to the wind. Pull- 
ing up their picket pins, they herded them into a 
sort of shelf where a great rock wall jutted out in 
a weird, wind-scoured formation, like a vast top on 
end. 

“She’s goin’ to hum fit to blow the shingles off a 
barn, pronto, an’ we’ll all be buried in sand,” said 
Big John cheerfully. “You an’ I gotta rig a tarp 
up here in these rocks, old-timer, before we hits the 
hay ag’in.” 

Sid was shivering like a leaf. He ran for his 
saddle roll and slipped on the fleece-lined coat, glad 
of its shelter. Then they unrolled the tarp, fighting 
it in the wind and the dark like some wild thing, until 
it was finally anchored and rose at a steep slant like 
a sort of bear den. Under it they laid their sleeping 
t 216 


THE DESERT’S FROWN 


rigs and then picked up Scotty, bag and all, and car- 
ried him over. Aside from a sleepy grunt or two, 
he slept right through it! The dogs were glad 
enough to follow them in and curl up again, backed 
up against the sleeping bags. 

“You remember how we batted the snow off the 
rag house walls up in Montana, Sid?” queried Big 
John as he crawled into his bag again. “Waal, same 
stunt here. Reach up an arm an’ hit her a good 
poke when she sags too much. There won’t be 
nawthin’ but sand hyarabouts, come morning.” 

They dozed off to sleep. Sid awoke before dawn 
with a sense of some great body pressing down on 
him. A howling tempest was raging down the gulch ; 
sand in sheets and clouds swirled by. Overhead the 
tarp sagged down on them all, and, pushing up on 
it, he found it immovable. His exertions wakened 
Big John and incidentally jammed an elbow into 
Scotty’s face so that that exemplary sleeper arose, 
spluttering and spitting sand out of his mouth. 

“Wh — wha — what’s happenin’ ?” he mumbled. “I 
dreamed the Grand Canyon had caved in on me ” 

“Sho’ has! Turn out an’ shove, old settler,” 
grunted Big John as the three put their shoulders to 
it. There seemed to be a ton of sand on that roof, 


217 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


and it would not slide off in the docile way that snow 
did. It lay heavy and inert, to sag back again as 
soon as a shoulder was withdrawn. 

“Say !” grinned Big John, his dusty eyes sparkling 
at them from where he sat humped up under the 
immovable tarp, “if that Atlas feller done this fer 
a job, that will be about all for Atlas! — gimme them 
rifles, boys, we’ll stick ’em up for sort of mine 
props.” 

They tugged the weapons, in their leather scab- 
bards, up out of the bedding, and with them propped 
up the roof. There was a chance now to look about. 
A fine dust filled the tent ; just out in front a smooth 
hummock of sand like a snowdrift had accumulated. 
Beyond roared the wind in a monstrous shout, in a 
fury awful and unending, and the dim light of dawn 
showed a yellow and opaque void all around them. 

“Waal, we’re alive, an’ that’s a mercy!” drawled 
Big John as the boys prepared to curl up in their 
bags again. “No water to-day, boys. We ain’t doin’ 
nawthin’, and we don’t drink nawthin ! — See ?” 

The stern iron tones of his voice told them that 
that was an order, peremptory as death ! Sid curled 
up and tried to forget that he was alive. An hour 
later he looked out. There was no change, except a 
218 


THE DESERT’S FROWN 


greater and yellower light, showing that the sun was 
busy somewhere high above all this. But, off to the 
left, right near the lean-to, were three large, indis- 
tinct objects, all in a row, that he finally perceived 
were their horses. Sid’s heart smote him. More 
than any speech was the dumb appeal of those three 
heads ! They were asking their men for water — and 
not getting it! Unmoved they stood there, patient, 
but eager. If one whinnied, the sound was lost in 
the howl of the storm. Sid thought of his own can- 
teen grimly. Not until they moved would man or 
beast touch water again! It was precious as dear 
life, now. 

About eleven o’clock the storm blew out. Their 
first intimation of it was a dazzling yellow haze, 
rapidly thinning the murk of sand dust and as rap- 
idly showing the details of rock and gulch near by 
in the desert. The dust thinned out, and blue sky 
began to develop overhead, and then the whole yel- 
low cloud drifted off north and they could dash out 
of their shelter and begin digging the sand off saddles 
and equipment. 

“Ramble, fellers ! — Ramble !” whooped Big John, 
yanking his saddle up out of the heap of sand that 
buried all the horse gear. “We’ll roll our freight 


219 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


out of here for Misery Tank, plumb pronto! We 
jest gotta git thar, come night, for — here goes the 
last of our water for the hosses !” 

Their second water bag collapsed flat, as a scant 
half pail was drawn from it for each of the three 
horses. The dogs got a remnant that was left, and 
then it was rolled up and stowed as of no further 
use. With eager haste the saddles were cinched, 
cantle rolls made up, and rifle scabbards slung. 
Then with a leg over and a chirrup to the dogs, they 
rode out of “Thirsty Gulch,” as Big John had named 
it. 

Sand, sand, sand ; and miles, miles, miles ! Black 
Mesa passed them to the south, and then came a great 
cliff with wavy stratified lines streaked across its 
face and flowering plants nearly buried in sand strew- 
ing the slopes that led up to it. The horses whin- 
nied and started on the first real run they had made 
that day. They smelled water, and it did not need 
Big John’s finger pointing to a deep rocky chasm 
under the cliff to tell where it lay. A rippled slope 
of white sand led up to it — and then the boys reined 
up with a cry of dismay. The tank was filled to the 
brim with white sand drift! 


CHAPTER XI 


WHITE MESA 

"W' THOA, thar, pards ! The world ain't fell 
XX over the moon, jist yet!" guffawed Big 
John at their blank faces. “She's thar, 
boys, only you’ve got to dig fer her. This desert's 
full of them little tricks on the pore tenderfoot." 

He got out his camp plate from a saddle bag and 
started digging. Ruler and the dogs were already 
shoveling industriously with eager paws, for their 
noses smelled the water. Sid grabbed out his plate 
and fell to, while Scotty held back the horses to 
keep them from burying their hoofs to the fetlocks in 
the sand and packing it too tight to dig. 

After a time it came out damp, then moist, then 
wet mud. Big John hove out the dogs and stood 
Sid aside, as they all watched the deep hollow they 
had made, nine pairs of eyes all trained on the one 
object of most engrossing interest in all the world, — 


221 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


the seepage of an almost invisible puddle of cool, 
clear water ! 

“Git me the canvas pail, an’ a cup, Sid — the hosses 
is first. Git outer thar, Ruler, you ole potlicker!” he 
roared, batting back the persistent hound. Scotty 
was struggling with the horses, jamming back on 
their curbs as they plunged and pawed, wild to get 
down into the sand and drink, drink, drink! Then 
three equine noses shoved urgently, fiercely at them, 
as a few cupfuls in a canvas pail were passed up. 

“This is nawthin’, boys !” grinned Big John, as the 
impatient animals were being watered. “Onct I hed 
to save myself by cuttin’ open a bisanaga cactus and 
go to poundin’ the inside with a club. Thet pulp is 
full of sweet water, an’ ye squeezes out the pulp 
an’ throws it away ontil ye hev maybe a pint of good 
clear water to drink. No old-timer dies of thirst, the 
way them writers is alius makin’ ’em do, down south 
in the barrel cactus country !” 

It was all of two hours later when the last of 
the water bags was filled and the party set off toward 
the southeast. If no accident befell they had water 
enough for the run to Los Capitanos del Canyon, 
where a blessed brook awaited them. The sand- 
storm had delayed them one day; the whole party 


222 


WHITE MESA 


were now worried lest they should be too late, for 
Neyani’s fate hung in the balance, and, perhaps, also 
that of Niltci’s mother and his sister. 

'‘That thar letter says the Injuns has took ’em 
off, somewhere, don’t it, Sid?” asked Big John as 
they discussed the matter, urging the horses along. 
“Waal, it’s a leetle deetour over to White Mesa, but 
I’m going thar, boys. That’s a sacred spot to them 
Navaho; they’re scairt to death of it, an’ think it’s 
full of ghosts, but the hull tribe sometimes comes 
thar to pull off some reeligious stunt, each brave sorta 
bolsterin’ up the other’s courage. It’s just whar they 
mought take ole Neyani — an’, of course, the Major, 
he couldn’t do nawthin’ but follow an’ try to talk 
some sense inter them, ef he heard tell that was whar 
Neyani was.” 

“I’ve heard of the Enchanted Mesa,” replied Sid. 
“The Navaho call it the ‘Judgment Throne of the 
Ghosts,’ don’t they?” 

“I dunno. It’s a skeery place to go by, in the 
moonlight, even for a white man. It’s as full of 
howls and roars, and the awfullest sounds a body 
ever listened to,” said Big John. “But I’ll bet my 
ol’ lid thet that’s whar Neyani is, right now !” 

After an hour’s riding White Mesa itself jutted 
223 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


up, in a long escarpment, shimmering with heat, in 
the immense distances. As they gradually neared it 
Sid felt that never had he beheld such a place. The 
odd chalky formation rose in ramparts and pinnacles, 
like bastions of huge whitened giant’s bones. By 
moonlight one could well expect to see whole regi- 
ments of bleached skeletons of departed Indians 
skipping across it. But there were living beings 
there, now ! 

“What did I tell you ?” chortled Big John. “Them 
little moving dots along the base is Injuns, on their 
ponies. Somethin’ doin’, thar, boys!” 

As they rode nearer to the blazing white sepulcher 
the moving dots showed color and took form. They 
were the Navaho, a lot of them. Soon some stopped 
to look at them and there was a commotion among 
the tiny black figures. Then a lone rider galloped 
furiously out toward them, mounted on a large 
black horse. 

“That’s no Injun, an’ no pony — it’s Major Hinch- 
man himself!” exclaimed Big John as the rider 
streaked out toward them. 

The man waved his sombrero. “Hi ! Hi ! — Back ! 
—Halt!” he called excitedly as he thundered to- 
ward them. 


224 


WHITE MESA 


“Yaas — we’re haltin’, a lot!” muttered Big John 
as they all reined up and he called back Ruler. 
“Wonder what’s up ?” 

“Hi! — Is that you, boys? — Howdy, strangers — 
get right down !” yelled the white giant on the horse, 
for it was Hinchman himself. “Jee-mentley-dingit, 
but it’s a mercy of Providence that you-all happened 
to come this way !” he exploded as he rode up close. 
“I couldn’t have met you at Monument Canyon with 
this coming off. But I see you’ve got the dawgs — 
Jeementley but they look good to me ! Whar’s the 
Colonel, Sid?” 

“Father’s laid up, sir, over in the Grand Canyon,” 
explained Sid. “Had a mix-up with a whale of a 
grizzly and got mauled some, but he’ll be all right, 
soon. It’s an old-time California silver-tip, Major, 
the biggest bear I ever saw. Got him in back of 
Buckskin. Niltci’s looking after father, while we 
came over ” 

“Niltci! Eh? Splen — did!” beamed Major 
Hinchman, his keen face lighting up with joy and 
relief. “You don’t tell me! Nothing on earth can 
convince these Injuns but that the Black Panther 
came and took him that night ” 

The boys laughed, and Big John grinned sheep- 
225 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


ishly. At the Major’s questioning glance he told 
him just how that affair really was managed. 
Hinchman howled with delight. “Better and bet- 
ter and better!” he cried, his eyes snapping with 
pleasure. “You see, boys, since you have been gone 
the Black Panther has been visiting all the Navaho 

sheep corrals I suppose the dogs running him 

scared him off Neyani’s — but anyhow he’s become a 
regular plague. The Navaho now think the Dsilyi 
is angry with the whole tribe, and they got madder 
and madder at Neyani over it. One day I found 
Neyani’s hogan broken down and he and the wife 
and girl were gone. Couldn’t get a word out of the 
tribe about it, but I suspected White Mesa would 
be where they would take them. To-day the whole 
tribe set off for here, and I followed. Ever hear of 
the Ganhi, boys?” 

They all shook their heads. 

“Well, they are giant spirits who live in the mesas 
and mountains, and they sometimes interfere in 
mortal affairs when things get too complex. This 
White Mesa’s a regular abode of them. Not a 
Navaho will come here except by daylight, and a 
crowd of them at that. They’ve got Neyani here, 
somewhere, up in the cliffs, waiting for the Ganhi 
226 


WHITE MESA 


to give some judgment as to what Dsilyi wants. 
Now, you-all have got Niltci, which they don’t know. 
Easy! We’ll stage a miracle with him on White 
Mesa ! Niltci will come back from the dead — from 
the house of Dsilyi, b’gosh ! and he’ll tell them” — he 
paused a minute while his quick brain plotted some- 
thing plausible — “I’ve got it!” he shouted joyously. 
“Why, it’s the chance I’ve been waiting for these 
five years! For five years I’ve been arguin’ with 
these fool redskins about their using these cheap 
traders’ dyes for their blankets. But they’re lazy 
and indifferent, and can’t see that the mills back east 
can make Navaho blankets by the thousand and 
eventually cut them out of their industry with vile 
imitations. The mills can imitate the patterns, but 
they can’t get those soft colors of the earth dyes 
made out here! My stunt is to drive that in by a 
miracle, and right now ! I’ll appear on White Mesa, 
you’ll see! I’ll be an oracle from Dsilyi, telling 
them that Niltci will come back to earth on White 
Mesa, and that the Black Panther will come no more, 
if they will get back to their native dyes again.” 

“Sounds good, sir,” said Sid. “How about 
Neyani ?” 

“I’ll take care of him, too. We’ll see what we 


227 


THE BLACK PANTHER 

shall see!” smiled the Major enigmatically. “I’m 
riding along with you, now. You-all turn back, pres- 
ently, after we get out of sight of the Injuns around 
the bases of those buttes yonder, and scout around. 
You’ll soon see where they are keeping Neyani and 
his family. Then — don’t be scared if you see a 
Ganhi, yourselves, boys ! And keep your wits about 
you! Better go into camp somewhere in here, and 
tie up the dogs — they’d only make trouble.” 

Once around the chalky bastions of the butte, the 
Major dismounted and, taking a bundle from his 
horse, began to climb up a deep cleft that led to the 
top of the mesa. Big John and the boys unsaddled 
the ponies and tethered them out, with the dogs 
leashed on watch under the shade of a huge cliff. 

“Better hook on your canteens, fellers,” said Big 
John as they started out. “ ’Twon’t look well to be 
askin’ the Injuns for a drink, an’ thar ain’t no water 
around hyar.” 

Presently they came upon Indians loping in on 
their ponies from the general direction of Canyon 
Cheyo. They tethered them in a rude corral, hastily 
thrown up near the entrance of a huge gap that cleft 
into the heart of the mesa. Its gorge was filled with 
Navaho, all silent and scared, and crowding close 
228 


WHITE MESA 


together for protection. Usually the noisiest of In- 
dian tribes, these bucks were now sullen and silent, 
greeting the white party with frightened nods, super- 
stitious fear written on every face. 

The way led up a steep, narrow ravine, bare of 
vegetation, a hideous gulch of hot and thirsty rocks. 
The procession had dwindled down to twos and 
threes, as Big John and the boys pushed on up it, 
passing the hesitating and reluctant Navaho. Evi- 
dently the tribe feared what they were about to 
see. 

Up near the head and slightly below the top of 
the mesa jutted a tall white shaft of stone. It was 
at least fifty feet high, and detached entirely from 
the cliff wall for some twenty feet down from the 
top. A stratified shelf of rock jutted out here, and 
upon it they saw the qcali and three assistant priests, 
in a ceremonial dress of feathers and plumes that 
almost disguised them. They were beating on small 
skin drums and chanting a dreary monotone as they 
danced in the jerky steps of the Indian. 

The boys watched them as they climbed, and then 
their attention was attracted to a sort of pocket or 
cave, opening by a cleft from the top of the mesa, 
in the sheer wall of the cliff opposite. The wind 
229 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


bellowed and sighed in it, making the weird noises 
that they had heard without being able to explain 
them, as they had come up the ravine. With every 
swirl of the wind scouring over the flat mesa top 
above, this cave answered with a huge sigh. A most 
uncanny effect — one would not like to be there at 
night ! 

"The mouth of a Ganhi, I suppose!” whispered 
Sid to Scotty as they paused. "They are supposed 
to be a sort of giant genii ” 

Then he stopped as his eye roved again to the 
stone pillar. Up on top of that white shaft of stone 
something moved! What he had thought at first 
glance were mere hummocks of rock or dusty bowl- 
ders, proved to be three human figures ! How they 
had been put there, or how long they had been 
there, he could not imagine. One of them was 
smaller than the other two, a pathetic little heap of 
misery — it was without doubt the girl, and the other 
two were Neyani and his wife ! the boy realized with 
a sudden shock. They were isolated, starving — and 
worse than that — oh, much worse — dying of thirst! 
That lonely rock, — under the pitiless desert sun ! 

He and Big John and Scotty pushed up rapidly 
toward the ledge as he passed word of his discovery. 

230 


WHITE MESA 


The Navaho were down below them in the ravine, 
straggling along in a thin line, watching the rock 
fearsomely, while the priests above chanted. This 
was the day when Neyani and his family were ex- 
pected to die, or confess, or tell of some vision from 
the Ganhi, evidently. 

Sid looked up. Neyani and his wife had long 
since given up hope, for they did not move. They 
squatted in the stony immovability of Indian pride, 
huddled on the bare top of the rock, enduring the 
thirst torture stolidly. But the girl was young, and 
life to her was yet sweet. She had moved and was 
now looking down at Sid, and her tongue stuck out 
at him, black and dry and revolting. At first the 
boy thought she was making a face at him ; then he 
realized that she could not draw back her tongue! 
She had reached the last stages of thirst, when the 
tongue protrudes like a strangling person’s, black and 
cracked and dry. Her dark eyes looked down at him 
beseechingly. 

“Gee, boys, do you see that? — Here! I can’t 
stand this!” barked Sid, tugging at his canteen. 
“That girl’s dying of thirst. I’ve been thirsty, too! 
I’m going to toss her up my canteen and let the In- 
dians do what they please about it !” 

231 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


At sight of it the girl stretched down her arms 
appealingly. Neyani and his wife might scorn to beg 
water, and their spirits still have stern command 
over their flesh, but the girl was young, and the all- 
devouring wants of her body drove out pride and 
all else in her overpowering desire for water, water, 
water ! 

A shout went up from the Navaho as Sid sprang 
up on the ledge, followed by Scotty and Big John. 
He motioned to toss up the canteen to the girl’s 
outstretched arms. 

The qcali stopped, angrily. “No!” he grunted, in 
English. “White boy not dare!” A roar went up 
from the ravine below and knives flashed out, while 
men stooped to pick up rocks. The three medicine 
men crouched behind the qcali, their eyes blazing 
hate and defiance. 

“No !” yelled the qcali, stretching out his arm in 
sign to halt. 

“Yes ! — Darn you! Have you no pity?” shouted 
Sid, stooping to toss up the canteen to the girl’s 
waiting hands. 

On the motion the qcali leaped for him, his three 
assistants at his back — but that was as far as they 
got! For Big John had leaped in front, and his 
232 


WHITE MESA 


guns had flashed out like two level bars of light. 
It was the first time the boys had ever seen a gun 
thrown, and the speed and certainty of it was as- 
tonishing. 

“Back off, thar, Injun! — or I’ll fill you so full of 
bullets they’ll put ye in the ammynition wagon in- 
stead of the ambulance!” gritted Big John’s quiet, 
iron-hard tones. “You leave the boy alone!” 

There was a tense instant. A single shrill war 
whoop rang out down in the ravine and then all was 
quiet. For, — out of the stillness, came an insistent 
rattle, like the whirr of some huge desert rattlesnake. 
It seemed to come from the cave opposite, and the 
Indians’ quick ears directed all their faces that way. 
Sid seized the moment when no eyes were on him to 
toss up the canteen, where it disappeared over the 
rim of the rock pillar. 

The whirr from the cave continued. Then a thin 
trickle of smoke came weaving out from the edges 
of its floor. A kind of gasp came from all the 
Navaho below, and into the medicine men’s eyes 
near Sid there crept an expression of superstitious 
fear. More smoke wafted out, as they all watched. 
It had a greenish tinge, then bluish. 

233 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


“Ganhi! Ganhi!” rose the indistinct, awe-stricken 
murmur from the crowd, while the weaker ones 
turned to flee. It needed but a touch to stampede 
them all! 

Then from the black depths of the cave, towards 
its mouth, floated the weirdest object the boys had 
ever looked on! It was immensely tall, filling the 
whole aperture from top to bottom. It had neither 
arms nor legs ; and what might be a head was a mass 
of feathers and prayer plumes, such as one would 
see on Indian momo masks. The rest was a con- 
fused drapery of skins and mystic ceremonial ob- 
jects. 

In a hollow voice the Ganhi began to speak, ad- 
dressing the Navaho in ghostly sentences that for 
them had all the tones of almighty authority. It 
paused between each utterance, while the crowd 
shuddered and all the Navaho raised their arms in 
prayer, following the lead of the medicine men on 
the ledge. After a time the Ganhi ceased, while 
fumes of smoke filled the cave and rendered it more 
and more indistinct. 

The qcali finally plucked up courage enough to 
croak out a word or two in reply, and then the Ganhi 
receded gradually into the cave, finally disappearing 
234 




WHITE MESA 


in clouds of smoke which puffed out as the vagrant 
winds listed up above. 

For a long time the crowd stood awe-struck, spell- 
bound. Then the qcali shouted out an order. A 
few responded, but the rest were hastening out of 
the ravine, flying from the Enchanted Mesa as 
quickly as they could get to their ponies. Big John 
and the boys waited until they saw a pole bridge 
being produced from somewhere and preparations 
being made to take down Neyani and his family, the 
qcali and his assistants addressing them with every 
mark of respect and tenderness. 

“Now’s a good time to ooze out of this, boys,” 
whispered Big John. “If that was the Major, he’s 
sure a shark on Indian ceremonials !” 


CHAPTER XII 


THE LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 

I T was dark and the Navaho had all gone when 
Major Hinchman appeared again in camp. 
“Went off fine, boys! The Black Panther’s 
not coming any more — that’ll be up to us, right 
pronto, for if he visits the Navaho sheep corrals a 
single time again we lose all we have gained. Niltci 
— I told them I was Niltci, now a Ganhi from the 
spirit world — Niltci will come back to earth again, 
soon, in that very cave on White Mesa, and I’ll make 
a great medicine man out of him without his know- 
ing any too much about it himself ! The dye busi- 
ness is already fixed up; Niltci can help me drive 
that home, too, after I’ve had a talk with him, or 
the Colonel can make a good missionary out of him, 
as you say he has a lot of influence over the boy, Sid. 
The thing for us to do now is to ride for Canyon 
236 


LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


Cheyo and camp somewhere on the brook to-night, 
and then run the panther with the dogs early to- 
morrow morning. I can only hope and pray that 
he don’t go sheep stealing to-night !” 

Around the camp fire that night they went over 
their plans. Sid and Scotty were to start for Lost 
Canyon at dawn, while Big John and the Major 
would ride with the dogs out to the eastern desert 
and pick up the Black Panther’s trail somewhere 
back in the timber west of the Navaho settlement. 
If they treed him, they would shoot and bury him, 
then and there; if he made for his lair in Lost Can- 
yon it would be up to the boys. 

“An’ believe me, I’ll be right behint his tail, Ma- 
jor!” declared Big John. “Them pesky boys is 
aimin’ to kill me of worry, an’ they’ll git me yet, 
with their wild an’ woolly doin’s! I’m fixin’ to be 
right thar when that ole comatabody goes a-sky- 
hootin’ all over the roof of that pueblo, as he’s bound 
to do as soon as they begins lettin’ lead inter him.” 

It was in the dark before dawn that Sid roused 
out, to awake Scotty and saddle Pinto. “To-day’s 
the day, old-timer!” he grinned delightedly, as his 
knuckles bored into Scotty’s ribs. “Up an’ at ’em, 
fellah!” 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


Silently they oiled and cleaned the rifles of desert 
sand, gulped down some coffee, and saddled their 
ponies. A rasp of chains where Ruler had arisen 
from his bed of pinyon straw told that he was awake 
and eager to be off. Sid went over to him. “Go 
git ’em, old snoozer!” he whispered affectionately, 
fondling the big hound’s long silky ears. “We’re 
sure depending on you !” Then with a pat for Pep- 
per and Bourbon, he walked over to Pinto to grip 
the bony ridge of his neck, jammed a foot into his 
stirrup, and was off, with Scotty galloping hard after 
him. 

By sunup they had reached the little dent in the 
side chasm that marked the great natural wall which 
blocked Lost Canyon. High above them, hanging 
down from the ledge at the foot of the cleft, still 
dangled the lariat. Picketing the ponies, they 
strapped on their rifles and climbed the fir tree where, 
arriving near its top branches, Sid took off his rifle 
and handed it to Scotty. 

“I’ll go up first, and then you tie on the rifles and 
I’ll haul them up the ledge. After that you swarm 
up, and we’ll make Fat Man’s Misery together.” 

Scotty sat in the swaying top of the fir tree, try- 
238 


LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


mg to get used to the height as Sid climbed up 
swiftly above him. To him it seemed a hideous 
business, even with a rope, and he wondered how 
Sid had ever had the courage to go up there without 
it the first time. Scotty’s was the kind of courage 
that needs lashing from a higher source, from the 
inner soul that rules over the whole man. He 
argued that his was the highest kind of courage, the 
kind that forces the cringing body to go ahead, al- 
though it is crying out with fear; but, nevertheless, 
he wished he had some of Sid’s kind, whatever it 
was, — that had no fear at all, that regarded this 
climb with the same matter-of-fact directness that he 
would have had it been near the ground and the 
element of danger eliminated. 

“Aw, — what’s the use of being afraid !” his mind 
belabored his craven body as he booted it into action 
when the time came for him to go up. But he was 
afraid! Horribly so, — as afraid as the tyro aloft 
in a man-o’-war’s rigging for the first time, and his 
climb up the narrow cleft did not improve it either. 
By the time they had reached the trail up to the 
pueblo, Scotty was thoroughly exhausted by his 
wrestles with his courage and far below the key of 
his usual manliness. A fearsome idea had obsessed 


* 


239 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


him after that climb and he now gave it words as 
they reached the roof of the cliff dwellings. 

“Sid, — suppose this is a real Asiatic black leop- 
ard?” he asked. “Did that ever occur to you, as a 
possible solution of his coloration?” 

“Aw !” grinned Sid, “where’ d you get that notion, 
Les ? It’s a color phase of our own ordinary cougar, 
that’s all.” 

“But it’s possible, though,” persisted Scotty. 
“Seems I remember reading once about a big 
circus that got strewn all over seven counties by a 
cyclone down here in Arizona. Now, if they had a 
black leopard in their menagerie ” 

“Even then — y’aren’t scared, are you?” inter- 
rupted Sid, scornfully, turning to gaze at Scotty with 
wondering eyes — Scotty who had met the Ring- 
Necked Grizzly alone up in Montana! 

“No, but I’m facing the facts,” retorted Scotty, 
stoutly. “If he is a black leopard, then he’ll stalk 
us — that’s the leopard’s game, every time. He’s not 
afraid of men.” 

“Well, what of it?” exclaimed Sid, intolerantly. 
“C’mon, we’ll try his den first.” 

Scotty shrugged his shoulders, as Sid led on with 
his rifle poised for instant action. In Sid’s present 
240 


LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


mood there was no use urging ordinary plain caution. 
Scotty, however, scanned the cliffs and trees about 
them warily. He wanted to make sure that no 
panther lurked up on some limb, to spring on them 
unawares as is the habit of the leopard in the East. 
Sid halted at the edge of the inner wall. 

“Woof!” he called, shying a stone into the dark 
recesses of the cave. “Hi ! — Come out and let’s look 
at you !” he taunted. 

But there was not a sound or a movement from 
those impenetrable depths. 

“Good business !” ejaculated Sid. “Nobody home. 
That means he’s out after his daily sheep, and the 
dogs’ll get a fresh track.” 

Scotty was not so sure. He looked around cau- 
tiously, unmindful of Sid’s amused sniffs. The tall 
boy led him over to show him the pueblo of the Old 
People, but even then, before its mouth Scotty hesi- 
tated, with rifle cocked, before venturing to peer 
down. He could bear the reproach in Sid’s eyes 
unblushingly, for to him Sid seemed casehardened, 
foolhardy almost. His own cave man within him 
was no such subdued creature as Sid’s, but was alert 
and tense as a deer, for a subtle sixth sense per- 
sisted in warning him that something lurked around 
241 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


that pueblo that was a deadly menace. It might be 
imagination ; it might be a finer instinct for danger ; 
or possibly some indistinguishable taint in the air 
that would have been plain as day to the nostrils of 
our ancestors. 

Disregarding Sid’s taunting protests, Scotty kept 
his rifle cocked and his body on hair trigger, ready to 
turn or spring aside or leap into instant action at the 
first hint of warning. Sid turned away from him in 
amused disdain and sat down ruggedly on the outer 
wall, his ear cocked for the first distant bay of the 
hounds. It was broad daylight, now, with the sun 
perhaps two hours high, and the chase was due to 
arrive any minute. 

“Gorry! It’s funny we don’t hear them!” ex- 
claimed Sid, impatiently, after perhaps fifteen min- 
utes of waiting, his eyes scanning the opposite rim 
impatiently. 

Scotty nerved himself to speak out what was in 
his mind. It was the brave thing to do — morally 
brave — and he did it. “Suppose, Sid, the Black 
Panther heard us coming, and just sneaked out of his 
lair, — and is prowling about here now ■” 

An impatient shrug of Sid’s shoulders stopped him. 
“Scotty, you’re nervous,” he said, solicitously. 

242 


LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


“Never let yourself get that way, or you won’t be 

able to shoot By George ! — There’s Ruler, 

now !” 

He had interrupted himself to gaze across the 
canyon. The great brown hound stood on the op- 
posite rim. Silently he had come out of the forest ; 
silent and perplexed, he sniffed the air, testing its 
scents. As they watched, his body suddenly stiffened 
and his tail went straight as a poker. His ears laid 
back and his teeth bared, and then a volleying bark 
rang out across the canyon. Ruler pawed the ground 
in his excitement — then he suddenly ceased and ran 
along the rim, a houndy growl, whimpering with 
eagerness, coming from him. 

“That settles it !” said Scotty, rising energetically. 
“He saw the Black Panther, Sid! His eyes are 
sharper than ours. That brute’s around here, some- 
where, behind us or above us — did you note where 
Ruler seemed to be looking?” 

Both boys were now alert and warned. They 
stepped slowly along the roof, toward the ladder 
end of it, rifles poised, eyes scanning every possible 
lurking place. 

“By — Gosh ! — There he is!” yelled Scotty in a 
sudden scream of fright. “Mark! — Cliff!” 

243 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


He had jumped back as Sid looked up, bewildered. 
Thirty feet over their heads, on the sheer face of 
the cliff where grew out the stubby roots of a spruce 
from a crack, crouched the great cat. His eyes 
smoldered green fire as he peered down at them 
over the root, and his pink mouth opened in a hid- 
eous, silent snarl. Then his ears flattened back. 

“Shoot! He’s going to jump!” barked Sid, his 
rifle springing to shoulder and crashing out as the 
bead swung up over a confused mass of black. 
Down through the smoke that long, lithe shape 
plunged like a plummet, a brawny forepaw stretched 
out, with the five talons outspread like steel hooks. 
Both boys leaped back rapidly across the roof, for 
when he landed he would rebound like some deadly 
infernal spring-machine at one of them. It was a 
diabolical black head, — the nose a snarling mass of 
wrinkles, the eyes spitting savage ferocity, that 
turned on Scotty with the quickness of a lightning 
flash when the Black Panther hit the roof. His at- 
tack was bewildering, a series of short springs, each 
a smash of the muscular forepaw, each a wicked 
snarl of formidable fangs and a hoarse, hissing cat- 
spit that nearly paralyzed Scotty with fright. The 
youth jumped back, the cat following, sparring at 
244 


LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


him as he pranced on three legs. It was impossible 
to get the gun muzzle up, as the sweep of that paw 
would have knocked it spinning out of his hands. 
Yet during the short five seconds of that rush Scotty 
was aware of the constant baying of a hound and 
the shouts of Sid to jump clear to one side so he 
could fire. Then a frightful blow, that ripped his 
sombrero brim and tore it from his head, sent his 
rifle up instinctively to ward off, and the next in- 
stant it was struck from his hands, bellowing like 
a cannon as the trigger jarred loose. 

For an instant the Black Panther recoiled at the 
noise, and in that instant Sid’s .30 whipped out its 
sharp report. High in the air leaped the great cat. 
All that had gone before was nothing to the feats of 
strength and agility he displayed now. He was hit, 
— he was enraged, — he was frantic with fury! In 
one terrific leap he cleared half the distance between 
himself and Sid; in the next he was pawing and 
striking around Sid’s gun muzzle, stuck into his face 
as the boy retreated, prodding at him and trying to 
reload. Scotty had picked up his .405 and was fran- 
tically yanking on its lever. Then past him leaped a 
brown shape, bellowing attack. Ruler it was — in the 
nick of time to save Sid ! He had done the incredible 
245 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


thing, the impossible thing, of climbing along the 
cougar’s cliff route through the spruces! At the 
hound’s raging bark, the Black Panther whirled 
about from Sid and his back and tail went up until 
he seemed ten feet tall. Ruler was a third his size, 
but the instinct to hump up at the sight of a dog 
seems ineradicable in all the cat tribe. 

The next instant he had leaped up on the cliff wall, 
above its hollowed-out arch, so as to get a high 
place from which to spring. “Shoot, Scotty! — 
Shoot quick!” yelled Sid, for his own rifle had 
jammed, with one cartridge in the chamber and an- 
other in the carrier, in the excitement of trying to 
reload with the panther pawing at him. The heavy 
.405 roared out, filling the whole arch with smoke. 
Down through it fell the Black Panther, paralyzed 
for the moment. He struck on his back, and the 
rafters of the ancient cliff-dwelling roof crackled 
under him. Toward Sid he floundered, his claws 
scratching the ’dobe. Blood spurted in a stream 
from his side and he was dying, but there was mur- 
der in his eyes, hate, fury, the yearning desire to kill 
in the last second of life left to him. Rapidly he 
crawled toward Sid, purposeful, determined not to 
die without his jaws clenched in at least one adver- 
246 


LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


sary. Ruler bit and worried and dragged back on 
him from behind, but the Black Panther ignored him 
completely. He had Sid cornered, in the angle be- 
tween the side and end wall of the pueblo, and he 
knew it. 

Scotty hesitated, with wabbling rifle, for a tense 
moment. If he fired he would certainly hit Sid, for 
the two were in line with him and the heavy bullet 
would crash clean through the Black Panther from 
behind. If he moved to another position he would 
be too late. 

And, during that instant of hesitation, shot after 
shot rang out up in the canyon. Bullets came in a 
leaden hail — from somewhere — as the cougar 
flinched and his head was struck from side to side 
as if lashed with an invisible whip. It seemed im- 
possible that a man could shoot so fast and so true 
as those bullets came that were crashing into the 
Black Panther’s skull. Then Scotty’s .405 went off, 
close at hand, with a stunning report, and everything 
was obliterated in a cloud of smoke. The cougar 
shuddered, in a last terrible convulsion which shook 
the pueblo walls, and then, with a crack of breaking 
poles, the roof gave way beneath him and the Black 
Panther sank from sight. 

247 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


A thin haze of smoke drifted out from the spruces 
on the cliff wall, between the pueblo and Fat Man’s 
Misery, as the boys looked around to see where those 
finishing shots had come from. Then Big John’s 
voice rang out from the green depths. 

“Say, — that was the devil’s own climb, boys! I 
ain’t so leetle but what I got a number ten foot and 
a number two haid, an’ that lariat looked like a pack 
cord to me ! How d’ye git down out’n hyar? — she’s 
all slide rock !” y 

Whoopee ! — Big John! The boys howled at each 
other happily at the sound of his familiar tones. 
Then Sid shouted him directions, and after a time 
he himself appeared over the ladder head on the 
pueblo wall. 

“Wa’n’t invited to the party but I got hyar, allee- 
samee pronto!” grinned Big John, as he mounted to 
the roof. “You boys’ll break this ole hoss- wrangler’s 
neck yit ! Right sociable time ye was havin’ with the 
trick cougar, eh, — Siddy boy!” he chuckled, winking 
at Scotty. “7 seen him, flewin’ round, soon’s I 
dumb through the cliff, so I wraps myself around a 
tree, up thar, an’ draws cyards to set in the game, 
too.” 

“Came in mighty handy, John — my next would 
248 


LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


have been a jump over that wall into kingdom come, 
if you hadn’t opened up!” laughed Sid, still fussing 
with the jammed army cartridge. “Darn a rimless 
shell, anyhow, I’ll say!” 

Ruler was having a wonderful time, all by himself, 
worrying at the carcass below, so they all dropped 
down to examine the great, glossy prize. 

“Gee, what a trophy!” exclaimed Sid, admiringly. 
“Cougar or leopard, he’s a scientific curiosity ! But 
we’ve got to bury him, boys. It’s our duty. We 
couldn’t ship that skin out of Arizona without the 
warden examining it, and word of it would sure 
get back to the Indians. We owe it to Major Hinch- 
man, fellows. Look for a kiva in this floor.” 

“Dern them Injuns, anyhow !” grunted Big John. 
“I hate to part with this ole boy, somehow ; we shore 
hev had a fine time with him !” 

They scratched around in the dust and after a 
time unearthed the round stone cover of the kiva, or 
underground cave, that is built in every pueblo for 
the mystic rites of the rain priests. Into its dark 
cavern the body of the Black Panther disappeared, 
forever, as they replaced the stone and tamped back 
the earth. 

“Shore it’s a demed shame!” snorted Big John. 
249 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


* ‘Good-by, kitty! You were a good kitty, an’ you 
give us a nice party while you lasted — only you didn’t 
onderstand that sheep ain’t public property ! C’mon, 
boys, we’ll have a fat job gittin’ Ruler down them 
ledges! The Major’s thar, waitin’ fer us with the 
other two dawgs. We shoved fer your canyon as 
soon as Ruler didn’t give tongue, fer I knew the 
Black Panther was hyar and there’d be doin’s.” 

“Sure was !” grinned Scotty. “But now that he is 
properly abolished, the Major ought to be able to 
smooth the Indians down all right. He can keep his 
word about the Black Panther coming no more, 
now.” 

Sid was the last to leave the little cliff dwelling. 
It was with a feeling of sadness that he turned away. 
The place had become tragic, the tomb of a noble 
beast that had been a notable character, in his way. 
Like the Indian, Sid inwardly begged his pardon 
for their having had to kill him. Jhis cliff dwelling 
would be his fitting monument. He belonged here, 
in the silence and mystery of an ancient and change- 
less land. For countless ages the cougar, the bear, 
the wolf, and the deer had lived with the red men 
of this country, generation after generation, cen- 
tury after century. They were part of it all, together 
250 


LAST STAND OF THE BLACK PANTHER 


with the desert sun and the clouds and winds. Life, 
as it was lived here, had become a settled, stabilized 
thing long, long ago. The White Man was an in- 
truder ; he could take it or leave it as he chose ; but 
he could not alter it, by one jot or tittle. 

Sid did not wish to alter it. The desert, the can- 
yon, and all their inhabitants suited him. 

“This is my country ! — These are my people ! ” he 
whispered to himself. “Ethnology for mine ! Prac- 
tical ethnology. I’ll begin with Major Hinchman 
for a guide. Some day, when all this blows over, 
I’ll come back up here and get those pottery treasures 
from the Old People’s pueblo.” 

Sid turned for a last look as they reached the 
point near the cleft from which Big John had fired. 
Silent, mysterious, inscrutable as eternity, the walls 
of the cliff dwelling nestled under its great over- 
arching cave. Old as the centuries, typical of this 
country and of the spirit that broods over its change- 
less canyon and desert, it had acquired a new dignity, 
it locked a new secret in its walls, for it was now 
the tomb of the Black Panther of the Navaho, and 
over it hung the sable majesty of Death. 

He turned to the cleft, where all was sweating 
activity. 


251 


THE BLACK PANTHER 


“Easy with Ruler, thar, Scotty !” Big John was 
bellowing from a precarious footing on the lower 
ledge. “The Colonel will skin me alive ef we drap 
him. We starts across for the Big Crack, to-night, 
boys. Let me git that white hoss atween my knees 
jest onct more — an’ ye don’t git me up no cliffs ag’in, 
nohow !” 


THE END 


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